Just a Speck: The Birnen Speck Cake
Thursday, November 26, 2009 
This photo is credited to Einwanger, Klaus-Maria on Kuechengoetter.com.
As a dessert detective agency, it is the official duty of CakeSpy to report on the birnen speck cake.
What's a birnen speck cake? Well, birnen means pear; speck roughly translates as bacon; and cake...well, you know that one.
Yup: Pear Bacon Cake. I was tipped off about this cake by Criminal Crafts, and finally hunted down a recipe and tutorial online on the site kuechengoetter.de. Basically this cake is made by laying bacon in a loaf pan, nestling pared pears on top, and then smothering it all in cake batter before baking it. The result? A confection which yields a strangely pretty slice, with pear shards surrounded by buttery cake, all surrounded by pink-red-and-white bacon. Ready to give it a try? While an effort to directly translate may not be easy, the recipe can be found here.
Reader Comments (8)
I hope you don't mind and I hope I didn't leave something out. ;)
Ingredients: 1/2 organic lemon, 50 g butter, 2 eggs (medium size), 1 ts sugar, Salz, 250 g wheat flour, 2 ts baking powder, 1/4 ts ground mace, 1/2 ts ground coriander, pepper, 250 ml whole milk, 100 g thinly-sliced bacon, 4 pears (~ 700 g)
Step 1:
Wash the organic lemon with hot water and dry it. Grate the zest and press out the juice. Cream the butter with eggs, sugar and a pinch of salt.
Step 2:
In a second bowl, mix lemon zest, flour, baking powder and spices. Gradually add the flour mixture and the milk to the egg mixture.
Step 3:
Line the loaf pan with baking paper. Set aside 4-5 slices of bacon for later. Line the bottom and the sides of the pan with the remaining bacon slices. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Step 4:
Peel the pears, remove the cores and cut them into four pieces lengthwise. Immediately drizzle the lemon juice on them and put half of them on the bacon. Fill in half of the batter and put the rest of the bacon and pears on it.
Step 5:
Pour the rest of the batter on the bacon and pears and smooth it down. Bake the cake in the center of the oven for about 50 minutes until golden brown. After 35 minutes, lower the temperature to 150°C. If the cake has already browned on the top, cover with aluminum foil or baking paper.
Step 6:
Take the cake out of the oven when its done and let it cool a bit. Extract from the pan and slice carefully.
Good job Evi! It does look very pretty, even tasty. There have been worse cominations, even on Top Chef!
Evi: Mind? That is awesome!! I tried to do google translate but it seemed sort of off. You did beautifully!
Thank you!
I love Baby Quilts: ha! And you know, I think that fig and bacon taste great together, so why not pear, right?
Wow! I love that you hunted this down! I made this cake years ago when working at a hotel in Bavaria. We were having a banquet dinner with different rooms representing regional cooking across Germany. My Chef handed off a number of recipes for me to make including this one, we put meat in everything so I was only a little shocked to see bacon in a cake. The version I ended up making had smaller chunks of diced pear in a spice cake. I think I cooked the bacon ahead of time and then crumbled it into the batter. I asked Herr Oswald to try a bite to see if I'd made the cake correctly and he said "are you kidding? I'd never actually EAT that". Coming from the man who taught me to schnitzel cow brains, I thought he was being a bit closed minded. I'm stoked to try the version you put up and very thankful for the translation, many thanks Cake Spy!
Pear + bacon... with all the bacon buzz and weird bacon combos, I would have never put these two together. Sounds ripe for a casserole.
Wow what an interesting cake! I bet it is delicious though:)
Wow, bacon in a cake......gotta try this one!
I want to hear if anybody has tried it, how is it? I have a holiday party tomorrow night and I need to make something....hhhmmm.