Have you heard of Matilda, The Travelling Swirly Pan? Started in the US, it’s a swirly pan that travels from one food writer to another. We bake something and write in the journal and add a photo and then send the pan and journal on.
Last year Australia decided to get its own pan and I was asked to take part. I recently I received ‘Tilly’ the pan. I had no idea it was going to take so much time to get this post done but the flu is a rough taskmaster. My apologies to the Travelling Swirly Pan fans. Once there are no more bloggers to send Tilly to, the recipes will be collected and made into an E-Book.
Upon close inspection of the pan that you can see in the photo above, there were lots of scratch marks where previous cake bakers hadn’t been able to get their cake out of the pan. I was forewarned. I greased that baby and then got a brush and gave it another go. I was determined that my cake was coming out.
It did. Sort of. I probably would have been better off with a bundt type pan for this cake but no matter, it was delicious! Even John ate a piece and that’s rare for him to eat cake.
- Butter, for greasing pan
- 400 grams/2 cups sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1½ cups vegetable oil
- ¼ cup orange juice
- 375g grams/3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 3 cups peeled and finely chopped apples
- 1 cup shredded coconut
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 113 grams/1/2 cup butter
- 225 grams/1 cup sugar
- 121 ml/1/2 cup buttermilk
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- Preheat the oven to 165C / 325F. Generously grease a tube or bundt pan.
- In a large bowl, combine the sugar, eggs, oil, orange juice, flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and vanilla extract; and mix well.
- Fold apples, coconut, and pecans into batter.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a tester comes out clean, about 1½ hours.
- Shortly before the cake is done, make the sauce.
- Melt the butter in a large saucepan, stir in the sugar, buttermilk, and baking soda, and bring to a good rolling boil, stirring constantly for 1 minute.
- When the cake comes out of the oven, pour the sauce over the hot cake in the pan. Let stand 1 hour, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.
- Serve with whipped cream or ice cream or go whole hog and serve both.
So you can see, it’s not a perfect swirly shape. I didn’t care – it was delicious. I think if I made it again I’d pop the cake out after 5 minutes of cooling and pour the sauce over once it was on the cooling rack.