Pears, two ways



Ladies and gentlemen, I am now the proud owner of a KitchenAid stand mixer. And not just any stand mixer; a professional-grade beauty with a 4 quart stainless steel bowl, 4 paddle attachments and a sexy, fire-engine red body. Definitely up there with the best birthday presents I have ever received.

So, it was only fitting that I bake something special, an inaugural dessert to break in the mixer and make use of its endless fabulous features. I searched through my cookbooks for an appropriately delicious recipe, but it was M who had the winning suggestion: a chocolate and pear cake, which we first made eons ago by hand in my tiny Montreal kitchen. We prepared the cake together on Friday night, and used the extra pears on a homemade pizza, along with baby spinach, prosciutto and feta. The cake came out extraordinarily well, the dough barely sweet and bursting with melting chocolate chunks and soft, sweet Anjou pears. Paired with partridgeberry and apple wine from my recent trip to Newfoundland and a good movie (*coughStevenSegalcough*) it was a lovely, and decadent, way to start the weekend.

*Note: this cake was a wholly collaborative creative, made possible by the invaluable help of M, chocolate and pear-chopper extraordinaire.*

Chocolate and pear cake
Adapted slightly from Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients
-       1 cup all-purpose flour
-       1 tbsp baking powder
-       ¼ tsp salt
-       3 eggs, room temperature
-       ¾ cup sugar
-       ½ cup (4 oz) unsalted butter
-       3 pears, peeled in a small dice (Anjou, Bosc or any other soft-ish variety)
-       ¾ cup semisweet chocolate chunks

1.     Preheat oven to 350F and grease and flour a 9” square pan; set aside.

2.     Using a stand mixer with a whip attachment (!!!) or a hand mixer with the same, beat eggs on high until they are pale and very thick (about 5 min with a stand mixer or up to 10 min with a hand mixer).

3.     While the eggs are beating, brown the butter by placing it in a medium saucepan and melting it on medium heat. Cook the butter until it is lightly brown and smells nutty (about 6-8 minutes), scraping the bottom frequently to ensure even browning. Remove from heat and set aside, keeping warm.

4.     When the eggs are sufficiently thick, add sugar and whip for a couple more minutes.

5.     Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Set aside.

6.     Just as the egg and sugar mixture is beginning to lose volume, turn down the mixer to stir, and add flour mixture and butter. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture, ½ the butter, then another 1/3 flour, the remainder of the butter and finally the remained of the flour. Stir after each addition until flour and butter are just incorporated, about a minute or so; do not over-mix or the batter will lose its volume.


7.     Pour batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle chocolate and pear evenly onto the top; bake for about 40-50 minutes, until the cake is golden brown and springs back at the touch, and tester comes out clean. Serve alone or with vanilla ice cream.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a b...
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook...
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe...
Read more