Has anyone made a Nantucket Pie? I saw someone make one on TikTok and decided that it looked so good and easy to make that I would try it. It’s very easy. Halved fresh cranberries, chopped walnuts and sugar are put on the bottom of a springform pan. Then a simple cake-type batter is placed on top of that. Bake, cool and flip upside down. Easy-peasy.
My first attempt tasted amazing but the cake part didn’t seem to cook all the way through. It was too thin and kind of gummy. BUT it still tasted great. I looked up the recipe online. They were all basically the same recipe that I used. One of them said to increase your cake ingredients by 50% if your pan is 10". I measured my pan and it was a bit over 9. So I increased the cake ingredients. This time the cake part was much more like a cake but the very center was not cooked all the way through. I baked it for 10 minutes longer than the recipe suggested and tried the toothpick method to test for doneness. It came out clean. My oven works for everything else.
What am I doing wrong? Do I just keep adding time to the baking?
I’ve never made Nantucket pie, but I have a lot of experience with similar sorts of dishes. It helps to use a recipe from a trusted source. I have full confidence that this King Arthur Baking recipe has been thoroughly tested because I have visited their test kitchen in Vermont. I wouldn’t have such confidence in a random recipe from an unfamiliar website. The King Arthur people call for a 10" pie plate or 9" square cake pan, not a springform pan.
They also call for the toothpick test for doneness, but in my experience, cakes and quick breads with damp-ish chunks like fruit are not great candidates for the toothpick test. Instead, I use an instant read thermometer. You want to bake it until the temperature in the very center is 200 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit. If the edges get overcooked before the center is done, next time reduce the oven temperature and bake for a longer time.
You can usually get a pretty good sense of how done a cake is, if the batter isn’t too deep, by pressing gently in the middle and seeing how springy it feels.
