Spiced maple & parsnip bundt cake recipe

_{Some items have been gifted}

I tried out this recipe for the first time last week. I found myself with a spare afternoon and decided that it was about time that I got back into baking. I always feel more inclined to bake at this time of year, especially when using delicious festive flavours like cinnamon, maple syrup and, erm, parsnip. Yes, you read that right: parsnip. Because today’s absolutely delicious recipe is for maple and parsnip bundt cake.Much like a carrot cake, the parsnip gives the bake texture and moistness. And, in all honestly, you wouldn’t really know that there was any parsnip in there. A few members of my family tried it and were surprised when I revealed my ‘secret’ ingredient.  I admit, the reason that I wanted to try out the new recipe wasn’t only because I’d pinned it a while ago and was bursting to eat some of that spiced goodness. It was because I’d just got a new bundt tin! When we moved house most of my baking tins mysteriously disappeared. Honestly, I still have no idea where they are. So I resisted replacing them for a long time until I had to admit to myself that they’d gone, and I needed to buy new ones.I picked up a pair of 22cm baking tins so that I could start making sponge cakes again and, while I was browsing the Forma House website, I found a matching 22cm bundt cake tin. I was super-pleased with this because it has a removable bundt mold, so it can also be used as a ‘normal’ cake tin too – providing another layer for my sponge cake, whenever I make it next. And it’s spring-form, which makes it SO much easier to get the cake out of the tin. I also got some new weighing scales, jug and wooden spoons.

Here’s the recipe for spiced maple and parsnip bundt cake and how I made it…

INGREDIENTS

175g butter, 125g soft brown sugar, 125g muscovado sugar, 100ml maple syrup, 3 eggs, 250g self raising flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 2 teaspoons of mixed spice, 250g peeled and grated parsnips, 1 peeled and grated eating apple, zest and juice of a lemon, icing sugar, white chocolate stars/your choice of sprinkles.

METHOD

Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat. Stir in the sugar and drizzle in the maple syrup. Stir until the sugar has completely dissolved. Allow to cool slightly. Whisk the eggs together and add into the cooled sugar mixture. Add the lemon zest and juice. Stir until combined and then add the dry ingredients. Stir together until the spiced mixture looks like peanut butter!  Add the grated parsnips and apple to the batter and mix together. Tip into a greased bundt cake tin and bake in the oven at 180c or 160c if it’s a fan oven or gas mark 4 for 50 minutes. Check with a skewer, and cook for a little longer if the sponge is still moist and sticky in the middle. When the skewer comes out clean, your cake is ready! Allow to cool completely in the tin before opening up the spring-form outer, and removing the bundt cake mold. Mix icing sugar and lemon juice together until it becomes the consistency of pouring cream and drizzle over the top of the cake. Drizzle over some maple syrup too, and sprinkle with white chocolate stars to make it look really festive! There you have it – one very tasty and rather pretty-looking bundt cake. The spiced flavour makes it a great alternative to Christmas pudding, and it’s the sort of cake you want to offer to guests with a cuppa throughout the autumn. When sliced up, this cake easily cut into 20 decent slices, and would stretch even further if you cut the pieces thinner.  We enjoyed it over a couple of days – just store it in a sealed cake tin. Let me know if you have a go at making this recipe – you can tweet me @Cassiefairy or tag me in your photos on Instagram @Cassiefairy. Or you can, of course, leave me a comment below.

Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂