Double Your Halvah, Double Your Fun?: Double Crumb Halvah Cake

Thalia Ho had me at the name of her "Double Crumb Halvah Cake." Halvah? Plus Crumbs x 2? I'm there! The recipe says that it yields a single 8-inch by 4-inch loaf, but I learned my lesson after making Ho's Espresso Marble Cake and Strawberry Sumac Buckle: it's a good idea to go up a pan size or two. So I used a 10-inch by 5-inch loaf pan instead.

First I made the crumble by combining flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, melted butter, and chopped toasted nuts (the recipe calls for walnuts but I didn't have any and used pecans instead). For the cake, I beat softened butter with brown sugar until pale; added eggs, followed by sesame oil and vanilla; and alternately added the dry ingredients (flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt) and sour cream. I poured half of the batter into my parchment-lined pan; scattered over half of the crumbs, followed by chunks of halvah (I used Seed + Mill marble halva); and spread over the remaining batter, followed by the remaining crumbs. I'm glad I used the larger pan, because it turned out to be the perfect size for the amount of batter and crumbs, and my cake still needed a few extra minutes beyond the range specified in the recipe (45-50 minutes) to finish baking.
It was difficult to make out the halvah in the finished cake -- it mostly melted into the crumbs in the middle of the cake. The recipe headnote says that the halvah "starts to dissolve during baking, turning into a molten mess that stickily seeps into the crumb." That description is completely accurate, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. The melted halvah lacked the grainy texture that is its most distinctive feature. 

I didn't particularly care for this cake, and I think what bothered me most was the flavor of the toasted sesame oil. There's only a tablespoon of the oil in the cake but somehow the flavor seemed to permeate every crumb. And while I absolutely love the flavor of toasted sesame oil (and I used Kadoya, the same brand we always buy), for some reason the flavor seemed completely misplaced and borderline acrid here. But I did absolutely love the crumb mixture, especially the portion on top that remained crunchy.
 
It's hard to avoid comparing this cake to Ottolenghi's very similar Walnut and Halvah Cake. The Ottolenghi cake has a much cleaner flavor and the halvah retains its essential sesame flavor and grainy character -- in large part I think because it uses a lot more halvah (180 grams) compared to this recipe (only 80 grams). I definitely prefer the Ottolenghi cake. But I would be interested in trying this cake again, without the sesame oil and with more halvah.

Recipe: "Double Crumb Halvah Cake" from Wild Sweetness by Thalia Ho.

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