passover week 2025 - passover hazelnut pear and quark cake

passover week 2025 - passover hazelnut pear and quark cake

• 11 Apr 2025

For my final bake for Passover Week 2025, I decided to make something a bit more elaborate. It may feel familiar because I have made this cake before but I renovated it for Passover by using potato starch instead of plain flour. In so doing, it also became a gluten free cake.

The original cake had a ricotta filling but as that isn't available here during Passover I looked for an alternative. You can make a ricotta style curd cheese at home but it's a time consuming process and you'll need to make it the day before assembling the filling. The alternate option is quark, which is available here during Passover. Quark is quite sour so I reduced the amount of quark in the filling and doubled the quantity of cream. The filling needs time to set, so you'll need to start the process the day before you serve the cake.

Here's the recipe for you which makes a 17cm cake. For all my recipes I use a 250ml cup and a 20 ml tablespoon, unsalted butter and 60g eggs. My oven is a conventional gas oven so if your oven is fan forced you may need to reduce the oven temperature by 20°C.

Passover pear, hazelnut and quark cake 
Hazelnut sponge 
125g eggs 
100g caster sugar
Pinch salt 
125g hazelnut meal
50g potato or tapioca starch
3 tsp grated lemon rind
40g melted butter, hot 

Pear filling
2 small ripe William pears 
50g caster sugar
1 tbs water
1/2 Vanilla pod, scraped

Cream 
250g whipping cream (35% fat)

125g quark
50g caster sugar or to taste
1/2 vanilla pod, scraped or 1 tsp vanilla paste
To serve – icing sugar

Hazelnut sponge
Heat an oven to 180°C, conventional and arrange a rack in the middle. Grease and flour a 17cm cake tin with potato starch then line the base with baking paper. Combine the sugar, eggs with a good pinch of salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment and beat until the mixture becomes very pale and fluffy and triples in size, about 5 minutes. Combine the hazelnut meal and flour and fold in ⅓ at a time. Lastly fold in the lemon rind and butter and mix until just incorporated.

Evenly pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin and level off. Bake until browned and springy on top, about 40 to 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely. Oven temperatures do vary, so if you’re finding the cake colours a bit early, cover the cake with foil for the remainder of the bake

Pear filling
Peel, core and dice the pear into 1-2 cm cubes. Place the diced pear, sugar, water, vanilla seeds and the scraped vanilla pod  into a small pan. Place over a medium heat then simmer until the pears begin to cook and release liquid and soften, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat, drain the pears reserving the syrup, transfer the pears to a bowl, and cool completely.

Cream filling
Whip the drained quark with 25g sugar until very smooth and creamy. Gently whip the cream with half the remaining sugar and the vanilla seeds or paste until soft peaks form. Fold a third of the quark into the whipped cream mixture, then fold the whipped cream mixture back into the quark mixture until just combined. Check for sweetness and add the remaining sugar if needed. Gently fold through the cooled pears. 

Assembly
Line the sides of the same cake pan you used to bake the cake with baking paper. Split the cake horizontally. Place one cake layer in the cake pan, then drizzle 1 to 2 tablespoons of pear syrup evenly over the cake. Spoon over the quark mixture and smooth over with a spatula. Drizzle the rest of the reserved pear syrup over the base of the top layer of sponge and carefully place the cake on top of the quark filling. 

Chill the cake for several hours in the fridge or overnight. Remove the cake from the pan, dust with icing sugar, then cut carefully into slices with a sharp knife and serve.

To ensure a clean cut I used a serrated knife to cut through the top layer and the filling.

That's the final bake for Passover Week 2025. I hope you enjoyed all the bakes I shared with you.

See you all again next week with some more baking from my kitchen.

Bye for now,

Jillian