Quince, hazelnut and maple cake

A recipe for a ridiculously autumnal cake

My neighbour brought round some quinces the other day, which is a good sentence, isn’t it? We already had a few, but ours were small and round and honestly still a little greenish looking from our dwarf tree. Not quite the thing. These were the big, pear-shaped golden ones that immediately scented the whole kitchen, but they also had a couple of quickly growing brown patches and demanded to be dealt with immediately. Cake.

Cake, Taylor?

When it comes to autumn cakes I don’t want anything particularly clever. Call me basic but I want: toasted nuts, burnt sugar, apples, maple syrup, cinnamon. And quinces if they come knocking. I want a cake I could serve to Taylor Swift, good knitwear, woodsmoke-scented air and kicking through leaves in cake form, and this is what this is.

One handy tip before I get into the recipe proper. Quinces are not great fun to peel and core as they are so hard and they discolour quickly. I dropped min into boiling water whole, boiled for about 20 minutes until they were soft to the tip of a knife, removed them and cooled them and then peeled and chopped, which is so much easier. You could boil for longer if you wanted them to develop that lovely coral colour they get from long cooking. I once cooked some so long (in the oven after poaching pieces in a wine and sugar and star anise syrup) that they turned a deep, beautiful ruby. Anyway, this works just as well either way, as long as they are softened.