Quince Cake with Almonds Recipe

I scored big last week, as not one, but two generous friends asked if I’d like to take a few quinces off their hands. I am systemically incapable of resisting free produce, especially when it comes from a friend’s garden (or a friend’s neighbor’s garden), and especially when it’s as old-world charming as quince. With this quince cake in mind, I said yes! yes! just tell me where and when and I’ll come a-running with my wheelbarrow!

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house. Maïa was one of my sister’s childhood friends, and her grandparents owned a beautiful stone farmhouse a little way outside of Paris — geography didn’t exist outside the classroom when I was little, so I have no idea where it really was — where my sister was invited from time to time, and I got to tag along one weekend in the fall.

And this is how I found myself with about five kilos of the yellow-green fruit, making my apartment smell very precisely like Maïa’s country house.

The adults stayed in the main house, but we kids were allowed to play and sleep in the upstairs room of an outbuilding that may have been a stable at some point, and was the ideal setting in which to reenact boarding school scenes from Roald Dahl’s autobiographical book Boy.

Further in the back of the property was a large garden with numerous fruit trees, many of which were quince trees (cognassiers) and bearing big gnarly fruit when I visited. This was my first encounter with quinces, those woody not-pears covered with fuzz. I don’t think I actually tasted their flesh until many years later, but their pervasive, extraordinary smell — like a musky cross between the pear and the pineapple — was everywhere around and inside that house, and the two are forever linked in my mind’s sensory library.

Going through five kilos of quince takes some stamina, and I devoted part of my weekend to the task. The first thing I did was poach as many as would fit in my pressure cooker, following this recipe for vanilla poached quince I wrote about two years ago. This is (yet) an(other) instance when the pressure cooker is the cook’s best friend, as it slashes down the poaching time to just thirty minutes, and makes zero mess on your cooking range.

Most of these poached quince quarters will be eaten just like that, in a bowl, with a little yogurt or cream and an optional sprinkle of granola, but some were enrolled into this simple quince cake with almonds.

It is a variation on my trusted yogurt cake. I’ve tweaked it a little to add some ground almonds and fold in the diced quinces* for a lovely fall cake, fragrant and very moist, that’s best eaten with your hands, while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the wooden floors of the living room.

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* If you maintain a sourdough starter, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve replaced the yogurt with an equal weight of the starter I collect at each feeding instead of discarding it. Indeed, I have found that sourdough starter (not particularly ripe, but not super old either) can be used as a yogurt substitute in cake recipes like this one: it has more or less the same consistency and acidity, and produces a wonderfully tender crumb.

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This post was first published in October 2010 and updated in January 2016.