Pecan Tea Cake (Shameless Box #2)

Try my fall-inspired pecan tea cake that's low in fat but rich in flavor. Perfect for any season/occasion :)

Ingredients

1. 2 large eggs

2. 1/3 cup milk
3. 1/4 cup applesauce
4. 2 tablespoons butter
5. 1 teaspoon hazelnut extract
6. 2 cups cake mix*
7. Chopped pecan
8. Yoghurt of your choice (optional)
9. Sprinkles of shredded coconut (optional)
10. Pecan halves (optional)

Instructions

1. Combine all wet ingredients (1-5).
2. Sift the cake mix.
3. Gently fold in the dry until there's no lumps. Make sure you are not over mixing your batter!
4. Mix chopped pecan in the batter.
5. Grease your pan and line with parchment paper. Pour in your batter.
6. Slam the pan on the table to get rid of excessive air bubbles in the mix.
7. Bake under 325 F for approximately 30 minutes.
8. Top with more pecans, vanilla yoghurt, and coconut shreds. Enjoy!

 

Notes

• You can use basically any kind of light flavored cake mix. I used the butter cake one. Yellow cake would work just as fine.
• If you have Greek yoghurt, fantastic, go ahead and serve it with your cake. If you are like me, who just bought tons of Trader Joe’s vanilla yoghurt, which comes in quite runny consistency, you might want to make your own  vanilla “greek” yoghurt. All you need is just a sifter, a bowl or mug, and paper towel (and your runny yoghurt of course). Put the sifter over the mug. Place two sheets of paper towel on the sifter, then spoon the yoghurt on top of them. Let sit for 3-4 hours or overnight in the refrigerator, and you will get yourself some extra thick vanilla yoghurt. Bam!
• Spice it up! I am a cinnamon monster myself by my family hate spices so I omitted it in my recipe. Feel free to add cinnamon, nutmeg, apple spice, anything you like.

Epilogue

The cake is moist, dense, not crumbly at all, has a kind of muffin-like texture... Anyhow, it's not like anything I've eaten before. I somehow suspect that the raising agency in the boxed mix was not working properly so that the cake turns out this dense, or maybe it contained egg white power and i didn't whip it up properly. I didn't check the instructions on the back so that's why. But I still liked the taste, and my family loved it too. Boxed cake does make a time-saver. But after this trial, I suppose it would be better to just make your own dry mix from scratch, using decent ingredients that you can name of. Or at least try to get high-quality mixes and read the instructions carefully. Anyway, still perfect kind of cake for snack, tea-time, holiday season, etc. You get the strong aroma of nuts and a hint of apple.