Chocolate Cake with Sunken Pears

Dough:

1. Heat red wine and reduce to 50 ml and then allow to cool.
2. Whip the cream with sugar, vanilla sugar and lemon zest until frothy. Gradually stir in the eggs one by one.
3. Mix the flour, baking powder and cocoa and sieve in several portions over the egg-cream mixture and fold in. When everything is well mixed, pour in the reduced red wine and stir in thoroughly.
4. Fill the dough into a rectangular shape (approx. 20 x 30 cm), leave to stand. Preheat the oven to 200 °.

Pears:

1. Roughly peel off the peel of the two lemons and save the rubbed off. Then squeeze the lemons and pour the juice into a larger bowl along with enough water. Peel the pears. Cut off the stem and flower base. First deposit in the lemon water. Then carefully hollow out the pears one by one from the flower base so that the core is removed. Put a prune in each cavity and immediately stick the pear with the narrow end up in the batter so that it does not turn brown. Keep an even distance. At first they look about 2 cm out of the dough, but have completely disappeared after baking. Sprinkle the chopped walnuts over everything.
2. When all the pears and nuts have been distributed, bake the cake for 60 minutes. Do a wooden stick test after 55 minutes. No more dough should stick. Let the cake sit for the remaining minutes with the oven switched off, then take it out and let it cool down.

Molding:

1. Heat the syrup, vanilla pulp and lemon zest in a saucepan so that it becomes liquid, and then immediately brush the surface of the cooled cake with it.
2. If the cake is cut open, it is visually very appealing if the cut is made through the middle of the pears.
3. Cake is fruity and not too sweet. Can be baked well in advance and frozen in portions. If you don’t like or don’t have caramel syrup, you can also use honey.