Tag: pears

Pear and cardamom cake for Petra

Excuse my absence. I don’t know what I’ve been doing. Oh yes I do! Potty training Kitty. I won’t go into it, but there’s been a lot of washing, scrubbing, mopping etc. I’m like Hercules trying to clean the Aegean stables!! Only I am better at accessorising. I like to team skinny black jeans and my new Adelphe diamond-slice ring with eau de toddlerpiss.

But look it’s nearly Christmas and though I loathe Christmas recipe pull-outs at this time of year – so confusing, so distracting – I thought I would recycle this cake that I made for my Grazia column (she said casually) and show it to you here, in case you don’t read Grazia and you’re looking for a mildly spiced cake to serve at some party or other.

And say Merry Christmas to you all! But, especially, to a girl called Petra I once knew a long time ago. A friend of a friend. I bumped into her husband the other day at a party, who I never recognise because he keeps changing his spectacles. At the moment he is wearing some intimidating horn-rimmed pair. “Petra reads your blog,” he said. “I’m sorry I don’t, I…” he floundered. It’s alright, I said. You’re not my demographic.

Anyway Petra is absolutely terrific, but she wasn’t at the party because she was working! At Christmas!! But I think she is a lawyer and so just works and occasionally, blinking at the daylight, leaves her office to eat a sandwich and breathe some non-recycled air.

(My favourite story about lawyers, by the way, was when I emailed my friend Jamie, who is a commercial barrister, on a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday about something – I wanted to email while I remembered what it was – and I joked “As it’s a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday Jamie, I expected a swift response as you will, obviously, be at work.” And he fucking was!)

The thing I remember most about Petra was at a dinner party I said I liked her necklace, some really beautiful magnificent choker-y thing with all manner of swizzles and sparkles on it. “It was my grandmother’s,” she said. “There’s an extra bit you can fit on it,” she said, describing a hook and eye in the air with her hands, “that makes it even bigger.”I just stared at her, boggling at the poshness of it all – I thought she was going to say she got it at Accessorize.

Thinking about Petra made me a bit sad. There are all these people, I think, old friends, who read this blog but I don’t see them or speak to them. Then it turns out they’ve been there all the time. It’s possibly best this way, when I think about it. If we were together they would just have to sit there while I rattled on and on just talking about myself and telling boring stories that start off about one thing and then turn into something else and then I suddenly stare out of the window and shout “Oh look there’s that fucking massive parakeet on the bird feeder again!!!” At least if you read this blog you can get up and go and make yourself a cup of tea or something. Get a bit of chocolate to sustain yourself until the pay-off.

And while you’re at it make this cake why don’t you.

This is a very classy cake because of the addition of cardamom, that most people are too scared to use in sweet baking because they don’t want a cake that tastes like curry. But it doesn’t taste like curry, it’s very nice. It’s like something they would make on Bake Off.

But it is absolutely huge, so only make this if you have a lot of people coming round.

Pear and Cardamom cake from The Ethicurean cookbook
Serves about 20, genuinely

315g salted butter at room temperature
315g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
5 eggs (!!!) lightly beaten
315g ground almonds
50g plain flour
1tbsp ground cardamom
1ripe pear (I used tinned pears, which worked very well)
70g dark chocolate

Heat the oven to 170C. Line the base and sides of a 23cm springform cake tin with baking parchment

1 Beat the butter and sugar together for about five minutes, or until pale and sort of fluffy.

2 Add all the dry ingredients and mix on slow until just combined. Remove the bowl from the machine and fold the mixture a few times with a spatula.

3 Turn it into the tin, level the top then place in the centre of the oven and bake for 20  minutes.

4 Slice your pear thinly and break the chocolate into pieces. 

5 Remove the cake from the oven. It will still be liquid. Press the chocolate pieces into the mix across the entire cake. Lay the pear slices on top of the cake and then sprinkle the cake with some sugar, for caramelisation and a bit of crunch. 

6 Put back in the oven. The recipe said for another 40 mins but mine took another 60 mins for a skewer to come out clean. All ovens are different, alas, which is why baking is such a fucking bore. 

Eat with creme fraiche, I’d say. While wearing a really amazing necklace. 



Pears, puff pastry and chocolate, for a truly unforgettable dessert – Italian Cuisine

Pears, puff pastry and chocolate, for a truly unforgettable dessert

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A layer of crêpes stuffed with pear and chocolate, enclosed in a crisp pastry: who can resist this sweet inviting?

You have always been fanatics of sweets at chocolate and you become crazy when it is paired with pears? Then there is nothing left to do but to learn the recipe of this by heart cake with pear, puff and chocolate: it will become your favorite dessert! If you are not yet convinced, know that inside hides a heart of crêpes!

Bella Elena tart: the first, the unforgettable

The most famous, most successful, most prepared version of a cake where pears blend with chocolate is undoubtedly the Bella Elena tart. A shortcrust pastry shell in which a chocolate custard wraps and wraps slices of abate pear, arranged raw on the bottom of the cake or, for an even greener version, browned with a knob of butter. The perfect dessert for a fine meal or for children's snacks.

The pears? Abbot

Among the most used pears for confectionery preparations are the abbotthat we also recommend. With a delicate and grainy pulp and a light citrus aroma, they are available from mid-September and for eight months a year. Their skin is greenish, with brown or yellow dots and, like all types of pears, they are rich in fibers, which help intestinal motility. They then have a high content of boron, which helps to better absorb calcium, preventing problems related to osteoporosis. This quality is also one of the most used in confectionery preparations.

The recipe of the puff pastry cake with pears and chocolate

Here's how to make this dessert.

Ingredients: 1 roll of 200 g puff pastry, 100 g of dark chocolate, 3 tablespoons of flour, 3 tablespoons of sugar, half a cup of raisin wine, 1 glass of milk, 4 whole eggs, 4 medium-sized Abbot pears, 70 g of ground almonds, a knob of butter.

Method: peel the pears, cut into small pieces and cook in a pan with the raisin wine and chocolate. When they are soft, turn off. In a bowl beat 4 eggs, add the flour, sugar and milk. Mix with a whisk to avoid lumps and leave the mixture covered with a sheet of film in the fridge for 30 minutes. Then with this mixture prepare 6 crêpes using a non-stick pan with a diameter of about 20 cm and, when they are ready, keep aside. With the dough line a round baking pan (previously greased and floured) and, in layers, arrange the pears, then a crêpe, then the pears, until you finish all the ingredients. Close the edges of the pastry, cover the surface with ground almonds and bake at 170 degrees for about 45 minutes. Once your pear, puff and chocolate cake is ready, wait a few minutes before serving.

In the tutorial some suggestions for a perfect result

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Recipe Pears in the pastry – Italian Cuisine – Italian Cuisine

Recipe Pears in the pastry - Italian Cuisine

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  • 300 g granulated sugar
  • 80 g shelled walnuts
  • 50 g apricot jam
  • 3 ripe Kaiser pears
  • 2 rolls of puff pastry
  • a cinnamon stick
  • an egg
  • powdered sugar
  • granulated sugar

For the recipe of pears in the pastry, peel the pears, cut them in half and remove the seeds to make a hollow to fill. Cook the sugar in 600 g of water with 2 pieces of cinnamon for 10-12 minutes, obtaining a syrup.
Lower the heat, dip the pears and cook for 9-10 minutes (15-20 minutes if they are not ripe). Drain on kitchen paper and allow to cool. Blend 50 g of walnuts and mix with the apricot jam. Cut 2 strips of 2 cm wide into the puff pastry.
Stuff the hollow of each half pear with a teaspoon of walnut and jam mixture, then "coat" them in the pastry as seen in the steps on the previous page. Sprinkle the pears with plenty of powdered sugar and bake at 200 ° C for 24-25 minutes. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with a little of their cooking syrup, sprinkle with icing sugar and complete with the remaining chopped sugar grains.

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