Chocolate, pear and walnut pudding

I was in need of dessert the other night and decided that I had to make use of the rapidly ripening pears in my possession.  I went looking online for a cakey, pudding type recipe.  I wanted something similar in texture to a self saucing pudding but it didn’t have have the sauce.  I found this recipe which turned out perfectly. It’s a Nigella Lawson recipe but I didn’t note the site I copied it from – my bad.  So the recipe as follows:

• 4 pears
• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup plain flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 140 g butter
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 2 tspns vanilla essence
• walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.    The pears were peeled, sliced and placed in the bottom of ceramic casserole dish.  Sprinkle the walnut pieces over the pears. The original recipe suggested that all other ingredients could be chucked in a food processor and blended up that way.  I don’t have one so I mixed it up the old fashioned way (by hand).  To the butter I added the sugar, flour, cocoa and baking powder and mixed well.  When this was mixed I added the eggs and vanilla and mixed till it formed a smooth batter.  The batter was smoothed over the top of the pears and the dish placed in the oven for about 35 minutes.

just add eggs

The pudding turned out delicious.  It was especially good with ice cream but I kind of wished that I had bought some custard (I was not in the mood to make my own from scratch).  I will definitely make this dessert again.  It was delicious (did I mention that?) and it had just the right cooked through but still a little squishy pudding texture that went so well with ice cream.  If you really wanted chocolate sauce it wouldn’t be too hard to find a few tips to make this a self saucing pudding (or you could just get some chocolate fudge sauce).

the finished product (the other photos with ice cream were even blurrier)

Pear and nectarine crumble

I decided the best way to use up my excess of fruit was to chop it all up and make a crumble.  This one contains pears and white nectarines.  I used just under a kilo of pears (I forget which kind, they had green skin) and about four nectarines.  The crumble topping was made up of about 125 grams of butter, some caster sugar, plain flour, a few hand fulls of rolled oats and some chopped walnuts.  I didn’t follow a recipe because I figured I could only get it so wrong. I mixed it all up till it looked about right, added it on top of the fruit and baked it in the oven for about an hour at 180 degrees Celsius.

It didn’t turn out too badly, the top was nice and crunchy – the oats and walnuts were the best bit.  The pears cooked up lovely but the nectarines were a bit smushy and tasteless.  I’d definitely cook another crumble but I’d use firmer fruit like pears or apples and less butter in the topping.

Spicy pear cookies

Although my baking has slowed a bit recently, I had some pears that I needed to do something with.  I thought, maybe a cake, or a fruit crumble?  But then I found this recipe for spicy pear cookies on AllRecipes.  I haven’t used up all the excess fruit I currently have but it’s a good start (and it gave me something to do the walnuts I inexplicably bought not long ago).  I have omitted the raisins from the original recipe because I don’t like them and they are gross. I put it down to eating too many of those tiny packs of sultanas as a child, I just don’t like the taste now.  It could also be that I don’t like really sweet things unless they’re made almost entirely of refined sugar – who knows?

Here’s the recipe:

• 115 g softened butter
• 1 and half cups brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tspn vanilla essence
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 and half tspns baking powder
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 1 tspn ground ginger
• 1 pear – peeled, cored and diced
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celsius.  In bowl cream butter and sugar, mix in egg and vanilla when well combined.  Add flour, baking powder, cinnamon and ginger to batter and mix well.  Stir in pears and walnuts.  On lined baking tray place tbspn sized rounded balls of dough.  Bake for 15-20 minutes.  This mixture gave me just under 30 cookies of reasonable size.

Raw dough is kind of gross too (but it has potential - unlike sultanas)

Fifteen minutes will get you a soft chewy cookie, but they might not come off the baking paper in one piece.  I cooked mine for twenty and they were crunchy at the edges and chewy in the middle.  These cookies are very tasty but if I were to make them again (and I might considering the number of pears I have) I would leave out a half cup of sugar (it makes the cookies delicious but I’m concerned the lovely taste is mostly sugar and not the spices I added).  I would also put in maybe another half cup of walnuts because they taste good and pears have quite a mild flavour.

Potential achieved!

The cookies are good though – I’d eaten four before I got them into their airtight plastic container