Dessert

Sweet Guest Post: Reader Shares His Fantastic Pear Dessert Recipe

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One of the great pleasures of maintaining this blog is that I get to connect with some very amazing people, mostly other fathers who cook for their families. One of my goals for the site is to encourage men to enter the kitchen and feel comfortable making dinner. I find the stories of these other fathers very inspiring, and I hope that you do, too.

My latest guest post is from a reader named Pat. He's the father of a two-year-old and a medical student who lives with his wife in Salt Lake City, Utah, and he helped me with one of my culinary shortcomings: dessert. I've never thought to make it (except for once). Pat, on the other hand, has mastered a very tasty treat, a roasted pear with ice cream and caramel sauce. From the sounds of how he came up with it, we could all learn a thing or two from him. Here is his story.

People often ask me how I got into cooking.  Though I played sports all growing up, I never really got into watching them.  In junior high school, I started watching a lot of food network.  While my buddies were watching football, I was learning about chipotles from Bobby Flay and steak from Alton Brown.  I was definitely the odd man out. 

About the same time, my parents instituted a new rule:  each kid had to do the dishes two nights a week.  I hated doing the dishes.  I talked my mom into a swapping me dish duty for cooking duty.  In spite of my dad’s protests, I made whatever struck my fancy.  My mom always encouraged my cooking.  The first real, from scratch meal was a Bobby Flay dish—grilled flank steak with home made barbeque sauce, blue cheese and a mushroom relish.  It didn’t look like Bobby’s, but it was the start of a beautiful relationship.

Some years later, while navigating the first few years of my marriage, I started cooking more.  My wife didn’t believe in seasonings (gasp), and instead of tackling that issue head on, I grabbed the pan.  Thankfully she has come around, and we enjoy culinary capers together on nightly basis.  We have a two year old son, and he’s awesome.  He helps me cook whenever I’m in the kitchen.  From pasta dough to chocolate persimmon muffins, he’s my sous chef extraordinaire. 

I’m in the middle of my second year of medical school, and as such I’m pretty busy.  Thankfully my wife and son are fine with cooking (and eating of course) being one of the main things we do together.  Enough about me.

John asked me to write about the evolution of a dessert I did for a dinner recently.  The dinner was part of a dinner club a classmate and I dreamed up.  We do dinner about once a month and alternate who hosts.  She is way more creative than I am, and makes amazing food.  She makes dark chocolate dipped sea salt caramels that are incredible; and those caramels are the start of the dessert.  The first caramel I had made me want to dabble in the dark arts of candy making.

After four failed batches of caramels, I decided to get serious.  I looked at a bunch of recipes, all with different techniques and combinations of ingredients.  I finally came up with a method that worked for me, and made my own version of dipped caramels for Christmas gifts.  About the same time, I decided I wanted to try a rosemary caramel.  I did a few variations of the rosemary caramel and it was a success.

I started thinking about how I could incorporate the rosemary caramel into a dessert for the dinner club.  I settled on a roasted pear with mascarpone ice cream and caramel sauce.  It was incredible.

 

Roasted Pear with Ice Cream and Rosemary Caramel Sauce

For the Rosemary Caramel sauce (enough for eight generous servings, plus left overs)

  • 1 cube stick (8T) butter
  • 1.5 cups cream
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 sprigs rosemary
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 cup corn syrup
  • 2 cups sugar

Combine cream, half of the cube of the butter (chopped into pieces), the vanilla, rosemary and salt in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring periodically, just until it is beginning to boil.  Remove from heat before allowing mixture to boil, cover with lid and allow to steep for 30+min (the longer you steep it, the more intense the rosemary flavor).  Strain the mixture and set aside.

Combine sugar, corn syrup in your biggest stock pot, equipped with your candy thermometer. Put on some oven mitts and a long sleeve shirt.  Bring the sugar mixture up to 302°F.  Add warm cream mixture and stir vigorously.  Bring mixture back up to about 220°F, remove from heat immediately and add remaining ½ cube of butter, stir until incorporated.  Let cool slightly, and serve.

 

For the Pears

  • 4 slightly under-ripe D’anjou pears
  • 4 T butter
  • Sugar
  • Nutmeg

Peel pears, slice in half, and remove seeds/core (I used a paring knife and melon baller).  Place in a baking dish and spread butter on pears.  Sprinkle with sugar and a dash of nutmeg.  Bake pears at 375F for about 20 minutes.  Turn pears over and cook for another 20min (or until desired doneness is achieved). 

I topped the pears with a scoop of mascarpone ice cream and the sauce.  The mascarpone recipe isn’t mine to give, but a good quality vanilla would do nicely in its place.  If you’re worried about it tasting like a pine tree, don’t. The rosemary is subtle, but awesome.

 

 

 

 

Saturday Afternoon Treat: A Vanilla Flan Recipe

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Next month, we will be moving to a new apartment. We need to leave our present place for a number of reasons (some of which date back to October of 2009, at which time I wrote about Chicken Tikka Masala) and I’ll eventually get around to telling that long story. In the meantime, our new home needs to be painted.

On Saturday afternoon we set off to the hardware store to select colors for its walls and to get paint samples. Santa Maria also wanted to go to a special yoga workshop, which was being held around the corner from the hardware store. Doing anything with kids is a little bit like swimming with your clothes on—you’ll get there, eventually, but it will take much longer than you’d like. By the time we reached the store, Santa Maria’s class was about to start, and I was left alone in the paint department with Nina and Pinta.

Pink is my girls’ favorite color, and I thought they would go straight for pink samples only, but they didn’t. They took some pink cards, but they also grabbed ones with blues and purples and blacks. In other words, we made no progress, so we headed home.

I was delighted with our outing, though. It was wonderful to spend time at the hardware store and then idly walk the snowy streets of Brooklyn. Over the last year, I was engaged in seemingly endless landlord-tenant legal maneuverings, as well as a repeatedly frustrating search for a new place to live. Now that all of that is over, I was enjoying my free time.

Back home I wanted to get a jump on the packing, so I made a flan. That might sound like procrastination, but E. B. White once wrote, “Possessions breed like mice. A man forgets what a raft of irrelevant junk he has collected about him till he tries to move it.” We have a lot of things around the house that we don’t need to bring to the new place. One of such thing was a long glass tube containing two organic vanilla beans.

I was inspired to use the vanilla beans by the chef Marcus Samuelsson, who recently tweeted his recipe for homemade vanilla syrup. I showed his recipe to Santa Maria, though, and she dismissed it. Not her kind of thing, but a few weeks ago she used one of the beans to make a flan herself.

She rushed the process though, and the result was not exactly appetizing—imagine sweet scrambled eggs. I was determined to make a smooth and creamy custard. Desserts are not something I have much experience with, and with Santa Maria out of the house I needed advice. So I turned to my reliable source: Mark Bittman’s "How to Cook Everything," the iPod application.

I nailed the texture, but completely failed to caramelize the sugar. I didn’t cook it long enough, so it didn’t turn golden. My mistake was keeping the heat too low, and relying on Pinta to time the cooking. That’s not what she set out to do, but when she started howling with hunger, I knew it was time to get that dessert in the oven and get on with the meal.

Vanilla Flan

 

  • ½ cup of sugar
  • ¼ cup water

Combine the sugar and the water in a pot, and heat over a low flame until the liquid turns clear, and then a golden brown.

Immediately pour the sugar into a pie dish or the ramekins that will be used for the custard, below.

To make the custard

  • 1 vanilla bean
  • 2 cups milk or cream
  • 2 eggs plus 2 yolks
  • Pinch salt
  • 1/3-cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees, and put a full kettle of water on to boil.

Slice the vanilla bean lengthwise and open it to expose the black seeds inside. With the tip of a spoon, scrape the black seeds out and toss them (they will clump) into the milk or cream mixture.

Heat the milk or cream until it is just about steaming.

With a whisk or a fork, mix the eggs, yolks, and sugar.

Slowly combine the heated milk with the eggs and then pour the custard into the pie dish or ramekins containing the caramelized sugar.

Place the pie dish or ramekins inside a larger baking dish, and then pour the hot water from the kettle into the baking dish to surround the custard.

Bake in the oven for about 45 minutes. The center should still be a bit wobbly when it is taken out.

Set on a rack to cool.

To serve, place the bottom of the dish into boiling water for 15 seconds, and then invert it on a plate.

Delicious with fresh whipped cream.

Merry Christmas!

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Earlier this week, for the first time in about five years, I slept past 9:30 a.m. I woke to a house that smelled of gingerbread cookies, and came downstairs to find Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria in the midst of making wonderful houses covered in white chocolate and multicolored candies.

I'll be back on Monday with more stories from the kitchen and beyond. In the meantime, a very Merry Christmas to all my readers. Thanks for following my adventures, and I hope everyone has a magnificent weekend.

Santa Maria’s Father Talks about his Cooking and She Shares Her World-Famous Chocolate Sauce Recipe

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We are spending the week at Santa Maria’s parents’ house, where we’re catching up on sleep and getting into the holiday spirit. Usually when we arrive, Santa Maria’s father, who does most of the cooking, has a meal ready for us, but he’s been busy taking care of Santa Maria’s mother, who is recovering from her injury a few weeks ago.

On our first night here, he served us a beef stew that one of his neighbors had prepared. Nina and Pinta didn’t care for it, but they quietly ate enough of the meat and their asparagus to have a piece of Santa Maria’s mother’s peach pie, which she had made over the summer and frozen before she hurt herself.

Santa Maria’s father may be busy, but he’s still running the kitchen. He made sure there were organic eggs and milk for us (he is a considerate host, even though he doesn’t buy organic for himself), and he’s already shown me a ham we could eat as well as a nice rib roast that we’ll either have or he’ll “save for a dinner party.”

Yesterday afternoon Santa Maria went off with Nina to buy candy so we can decorate the gingerbread houses we plan on making later in the week, and I took a moment to talk with her father about the cooking he does.

My first real cooking experience was in the Boy Scouts, cooking, and then earning the cooking merit badge. After I was married and when the children were growing up I was working and their mother did most of the cooking. I would make breakfast things, waffles and crepes suzettes, which are really more of a dessert. I made them with cinnamon and sugar for the kids, but I tried to make them once in a while for myself with Grand Marnier because that’s the first kind I ever had. It was at the New York World’s Fair, in 1939. I was there with my daddy and he was Belgian so we stopped at the crepe stand. 1939fairhelicline

About two decades ago, when I retired, I started cooking more. My wife makes the salads, desserts and hors d'oeuvres. I make the entrees. I’ll also do soups. My usual soup is made with leftovers. I put all the leftover stuff from the entrees, and that includes vegetables, and mix it with a commercially available soup, such as Progresso, for flavor. There isn’t much need to add salt at that point.

 There aren’t very many other men around here my age who cook as much as I do. I like to do it because of my bachelor days as a mining engineer.  I was in a place called Grand Junction, Colorado, and we’d get three days in town, and then we’d spend eleven days in the field. You had to cook for yourself. To me it was not a choice. I found that the easiest thing to do was to get a chicken and some vegetables and a pressure cooker.  We all had our own trailers out in the field, and the chicken would last three or four days. Maybe once a week I’d invite someone over or go to someone else’s trailer for dinner. It was cook and eat or not. I tried a cherry pie once, but it ended up all over the oven.

My advice to men who want to cook is to put the television in the kitchen or in the next room, that way you can get the news as you make the dinner. Also, start with something simple, like a roast chicken.

Santa Maria’s father may think of himself as an entrée man, but one of his greatest legacies is dessert. If Santa Maria came with a dowry, it was her chocolate sauce, which she learned from her father. Anyone who has ever had it wants to know how to make it. As it turns out, the recipe is an old family favorite. “That was my mother’s chocolate sauce,” her dad says.

 Santa Maria's Family Chocolate Sauce Recipe

 

  • 1 bar 70% dark chocolate
  • 2 T butter
  • 2 T sugar (or to taste – I never measure these quantities, so do taste as you go and adjust accordingly)
  • 2 shakes cinnamon
  • ¼ t salt
  • ¼ cup water
  • 1 t vanilla extract

 

Bring everything to a boil, whisking constantly.  Turn down heat and boil, low but rolling, for three minutes.

Serve hot over poached pears, vanilla ice cream, walnuts, or anything you desire. I survived on fresh, warm-to-the-touch Hungarian bread dipped in this gooey sauce for days on end in icy December while in Budapest as a student with my dear friend Betsy A. I did end up in the hospital, but that’s another story.  Dr. Ferenczi sent me cute, round, picture postcards of the city for a year or so after.

Holiday Rush: A Gingerbread Dough and Cookie Recipe

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We are headed to the grandparents in Pennsylvania for the holidays, but like much of family life, the journey has been anything but a linear progression. My office is closed the week before Christmas, and we intended to leave on Sunday. We accelerated our departure, though, because our landlords are renovating an apartment below us, and the fumes from refinishing the floors were making us dizzy (and cold and sick because we had to leave the windows wide open).

We left town on Saturday, but before heading west on I-80, we detoured to a pair of parties in Manhattan, and then headed to my mother’s place north of the city for what was to be just one night.

We arrived at my mother's late, had a rough night because Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria have coughs, and chose to stay an extra day. It was too cold to spend much time outside on Sunday, so Santa Maria decided to make gingerbread dough. When we get to Pennsylvania, we’ll turn the dough into houses, but for now we settled on a few cookies.

Gingerbread Dough and Cookie Recipe from Santa Maria (with her notes)

We only had a default 'boy' shape cutter and the girls were dismayed so I pinched some triangles of dough around the hips and other, tiny ones on the head et voila!  Gingerbread girls with hair and dresses!  (At our apartment in Brooklyn we have a tiny matched set, a gingerbread girl and boy, but not at SaSD's family home). Some we glazed with a simple confectioner's sugar frosting (mix in a bit of milk and spread on cooled cookies), others left plain for the more puritanical.

  •  3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  •  3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  •  3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter (room temperature, softened)
  •  1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
  •  1 T ground ginger
  •  1 T ground cinnamon
  •  1/2 t ground cloves
  •  1/2 t ground nutmeg
  •  dash of ground black pepper
  •  1/2 teaspoon salt
  •  1 large egg
  •  1/2 cup unsulfured molasses

 

 In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, and spices. Set aside.



Cream the butter. Add sugar and beat until fluffy. Mix in eggs and molasses. Gradually add the flour mixture (You may need to work it with your hands to incorporate the last bit of flour.) Divide dough in thirds; wrap each third in plastic. Chill for at least 1 hour or overnight. Before rolling out, let sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes.

Heat oven to 350°. Place a dough third on a large piece of lightly floured parchment paper or wax paper. Using a rolling pin, roll dough 1/8 inch thick. Refrigerate again for 5-10 minutes to make it easier to cut out the cookies. Use either a cookie cutter or place a stencil over the dough and use a knife to cut into desired shapes. Press raisins in the center of each cookie if desired for eyes, nose, mouth, and buttons on torso.

Transfer to ungreased baking sheets. Bake until crisp but not darkened, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven. Let sit a few minutes and then use a metal spatula to transfer cookies to a wire rack to cool completely. Decorate as desired.

Makes 16 5-inch long cookies.

Trouble in Paradise: Cupcakes Don’t Save the Day

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Apparently Santa Maria has been studying the Victoria marinara jar. Yesterday afternoon, she responded to a commenter on this site who wanted to know if there were any fillers in the sauce by listing, verbatim, the ingredients on its label: “imported Italian tomatoes, pure Italian olive oil, fresh onions, fresh basil, fresh garlic, sea salt, spices.”

Last night I had planned on preparing our quick Indian weeknight special, but when I came home from work, there was a bowl of freshly cooked pasta waiting for me, topped with the Victoria sauce, chopped mozzarella, and freshly grated parmesan, with a side of Hot Robot Spinach. Santa Maria had made me dinner.

I took a bite of the pasta. “It’s so good, isn’t it,” she said with a sly smile. “I see no reason why we would ever have to make homemade sauce again.” Uh oh, I thought, am I out of a job?

To impress her with my culinary knowledge, I told her about a website that I had found that afternoon: Cupcakes Take the Cake, which links “to over 400 bakeries (divided into NYC bakeries, non-NYC U.S. bakeries, and international bakeries)” and aggregates recipes from bloggers and elsewhere for the delectable treat. “Oh, I’ve known about that for ages,” she said. What’s a guy to do?

Holiday Apple Pie Recipe

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I emailed my sister the other day to see what I could bring to her house for Thanksgiving, and she told me that, by some magical calculation on her part, I’m entitled to “get the day off.” Apparently, she’s roped Santa Maria into making an apple pie.

Santa Maria’s apple pies are somewhat legendary among my extended family (not, perhaps, as legendary as her chocolate sauce, a rich confection of chocolate, butter, and assorted spices as secret as they are delicious), but still mighty popular.

She plans on making a pie on Wednesday, but in case you are looking for something to bring (or serve) at your Thanksgiving, I sweet talked her into sharing the recipe today:

I like a tart pie, juicy and toothsome, with a flaky golden crust.  It’s true that lard or Crisco make for easier flakiness, but I prefer the concept of butter and stick to that.

Here are some things I don’t do, by the way.  I don’t sift the flour and salt for the crust; I don’t dot the fruit with more butter before putting on the top crust; I cut the sugar in half and increase the number of apples because I like a high fruit:crust ratio.  I do use twice as much cinnamon as other recipes.  I use tapioca instead of corn starch as a thickener (but you MUST let it stand 15 minutes before you bake if you use tapioca).

 

Santa Maria's Holiday Apple Pie

 

Crust:

  • 2 c flour (don’t use the healthier kind with germ – just regular all purpose is fine)
  • 1 t salt
  • 2/3 c butter
  • 4 T to 1/3 cup ice water

Mix flour and salt. Cut the butter into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or with your food processor until the butter is the size of peas. 

Sprinkle the mixture with 4 T ice water and blend with a fork. Keep adding more water until it holds together (sometimes I use nearly a 1/3 cup).  Gather it up into 2 balls using wax paper.  Chill in the fridge (or faster in the freezer) while you make the filling (below).  Makes a top and bottom crust for a 9” pie.

 

Filling:

 

  • 6 cups peeled and sliced apples (I like to combine Macoun, Mutsu, and Granny Smith – but you can use any combination.  I also prefer to slice them very thinly. If you want it sweeter, like the way my folks like it, use a few Yellow Delicious apples in the pie).
  • 2 T. tapioca
  • 1/3 c sugar
  • 2 t cinnamon (I like it very cinnamon-y)
  • juice of ½ lemon

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Mix all the ingredients together.  Let stand 15 minutes.  Line a 9-inch pie plate with crust, fill with the fruit mixture, cover with top crust.  Seal and flute the edge.  Use a sharp (non- serrated) knife to slice a pattern of your choice in the top crust to let out the steam.  My kids are pleased when I make interlocking hearts.  Sprinkle with a bit of sugar on top.  Bake 45 minutes or until golden on top.

 

BONUS TWIRLS FOR YOU!!

 

Here’s something else I do: increase the crust recipe by half (i.e. use 3 cups of flour and an entire cup of butter [two sticks]) so that I have a ball of dough left over to make cinnamon twirls aka rugelach.  These are everyone’s favorite, actually much more popular than the pie itself.

Roll out the dough; slather with another 2 T softened butter; sprinkle with ½ c brown sugar and a LOT of cinnamon (I am cinnamon-crazy).  Roll it up like a log and pinch the seam shut.  You may need to cut it into two rectangles, approximately 4 inches wide, before you roll it up so that the rolls are not too large.  My goal is to have a twirl with a 1 inch diameter.  Bake in the oven until golden (much quicker than the pie – DON’T BURN THEM!! – sometimes not much more than 10-15 minutes.  Keep checking).  Enjoy with a big glass of cold milk.

My paternal grandma made these for me when I was little.  She had a little silky cocker spaniel named Dinah – I loved to pet her just like I loved to pet the cattails that grew on the edges of the lake. Fuelled by milk and goodies, we’d run for hours and hours around the grounds and finally collapse.

 

Win-Win Gluten-Free Pumpkin Pie Recipe

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The run-up to Thanksgiving is well underway. I see it in the newspaper, on my Twitter feed, and on cable television (I’m guessing, as I don’t have cable). Around the Stay at Stove Dad home, plans are being laid as well. My sister on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, who volunteered to host this year, is busy getting ready.

She maintains a gluten-free diet, and though she’s promised not to make a gluten-free dinner, she has been hard at work perfecting some treats she’ll be able to eat herself.

This past weekend she tried out a gluten-free pumpkin pie recipe. A few readers have asked me for a pie recipe, and Santa Maria’s agreed to share her mouthwatering apple-pie secrets. She’ll be baking one on Wednesday to bring to Thanksgiving. In the meantime, here’s what my sister has to say about making a gluten-free pie.

She worked from a recipe on Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, a wonderful resource for anyone looking to take gluten out of their diet without sacrificing flavor and adventure.

I always trust my sister when it comes to baking. Growing up, she’s the one who filled the house with lemon-meringue pies, snickerdoodles, and chocolate-chip cookies. I never developed much of a sweet tooth, but it was nice to know those treats existed (and I always marveled at the architectural beauty of a lemon meringue pie—all those peaks like little cathedrals).

A true multi-tasking contemporary mom, my sister made the pie while watching the USA national women's soccer team battle Italy. She used this recipe from Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, and had the following comments.

Her recipe is a good one. I followed it exactly. Glad I did as it is not an easy dough to work with. It gets crumbly, and needs a lot of finesse. The only change I will make when I make another for Thanksgiving is to add a pinch of salt to the dough.

I followed her directions to use the recipe for the filling from the Libby can. I did. I have never done that. I have always used more elaborate recipes. But, the Libby recipe is perfect. I have to say I will never go back.

As for the final result: “It is terrific!!! I can't believe it. Wow. What a relief,” she said.

And, she added “The team USA women won in stoppage time in the second half. It was a brilliant goal and a devastating loss for Italy as they had held the USA to 0-0 through the whole game. They will play another game next Saturday in Chicago. If they tie that game, USA will still win the World Cup berth as away goals (today's goal) count twice!”

 

The Point of Making Meringues

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The truth about what happened on Saturday is that Santa Maria's eighty-six-year old mother could have fallen down anywhere. It ruined her trip and made for an awful weekend that she fell while visiting us, but there is an upside to her being here.

New York City has some of the world's finest doctors, and Santa Maria spent the day on the phone with at least half of them. Her grip on the cordless phone was so unrelenting that she wore out two batteries. Before going to work, I bought her a cheap plug-in phone.

After hours on the phone she hit paydirt, thanks to the recommendation of her dear friend Ngozi's brother T.O. — she got an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon at Mt. Sinai who is a leader in the field; he had an opening at 3 p.m. Santa Maria and her parents returned from the visit with relatively astonishing news. The fracture is more complicated than first thought, but the doctor, a pioneer in a technique using local anesthesia (which is much less risky for an elderly patient than general anesthesia), can do the operation on Thursday.

Santa Maria's mother was as elated as one could be under the circumstances. She took hold of the cordless phone and did her best to wear out the battery, chatting animatedly with her friends back home.

A general sense of optimism filled the house, and the good feelings reminded me of another of Santa Maria's recent efforts. Over the weekend, when my mother was in town, Santa Maria found the time during Saturday's chaos to make a delicious dessert.

I was out in the afternoon attending to our real-estate needs, and on my way back to the house before dinner, my cell phone rang. Santa Maria wanted me to get fresh berries and vanilla ice cream. She was baking meringues for our mothers.

I love meringues. To me they are the perfect dessert—sweet, delicious, and full of protein. No matter what the circumstances, they will lift anyone's spirits.

Meringues with Berries and Ice Cream

  • 4 egg whites
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 t. vanilla extract
  • 1 pint fresh raspberries, strawberries, or other fruit
  • vanilla ice cream

Beat eggwhites til frothy.  Add vanilla.  Add sugar a few spoonfuls at a time. Beat until stiff peaks form.  Scoop onto parchment paper and bake (really, oven-dry) at 225 degrees for a long time (about a hour) — depending on whether you like them chewy inside or crunchy. 

Proper recipes will tell you to make sure the egg whites are at 70 degrees, and to sift the sugar.  I'm lazy and don't do either.  It is important to preheat the oven or you may burn the bottoms.  Also, Joy of Cooking says that if you like chewy, 275 degrees; if you like crunchy 225 degrees.  And leave them in the oven, with the heat turned off, and the door cracked open, to cool, for 30 minutes or so.  Yum yum yum!

Serve with berries and ice cream on top.

My First Time Baking: A Recipe for Pear Upside-Down Cake

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I don’t have many memories of my mother baking, which is not to say she didn’t do it ever. Though as Santa Maria says, who could blame her if she didn’t—she had five kids to care for.  I recall her making Christmas cookies with my sisters, and she successfully passed the female baking baton off to them. I owe most of my memories of baked goods, including snickerdoodles, butterscotch brownies, and lemon-meringue pie, to my sisters.

 

My mother stuck to making Irish soda bread, and someday I’ll share the recipe (as soon as I get her permission). She makes a new world version with less butter, and no caraway seeds (she was the eldest daughter in a family with five daughters and one son, my delightful uncle John. As a boy, John didn’t like caraway seeds so no one else got to eat them either).

One thing I do remember my mother making is pineapple upside-down cake, which was a syrupy and sweet dentist’s nightmare. If I close my eyes, I can still see the caramelized yellow cubes of fruit and taste the brown gooey bits of sugar. I loved it.

On Wednesday last week, Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times about a variation on the pineapple upside-down cake, using maple syrup and pears instead of plain sugar and the Hawaiian fruit. I love pears and I was enticed to consider making it.

Santa Maria is correct in thinking that my mom was too busy to bake when I was young. Her mom, Jane, is a relentless baker even at eight-six years old—she has pies and cookies in the freezer every time we go to visit—but she only had two children. My mother was busy making school lunches, breakfasts, and dinners seven days a week. Seven days a week! We hardly ever ate out, and I’ve never once had a frozen dinner. She did an astonishing job.

I’m tired from cooking for just two kids, and I serve them frozen fish sticks three times a week. I basically want for my children what I had growing up—home-cooked meals and a balanced diet.

 

On his video about making the cake, Bittman talks about how little patience he has for the details of baking. Santa Maria is not known for her patience, but she is a seasoned baker with very particular tastes. She took one look at his recipe and made a few adjustments. I defer to her in all dessert-related matters, and, the truth is, I didn’t feel confident. I was happy to have her guidance. (She threw out the maple syrup, which she said she didn’t like the taste of in baked goods, and she twiddled with a few of the other proportions. She typically reduces the amount of sugar by at least a third.)

Cooking is easy for me because I’ve mastered a few basic techniques and I stick to them. I can take on new recipes fairly confident about how they’ll turn out because I’ll pick ones that build on these basic skills. Baking is another question. I’ve never been interested in doing it because I’ve been preoccupied with my needs and not my desires. I need to eat, and I need to eat well. Not too much sugar, and more daily calories than a high school football lineman would consume in a day. That takes a lot of work.

But as I’ve gotten better at managing the day-to-day cooking (and as my metabolism has slowed a bit), I’m starting to think about my desires. A slice of cake after dinner sounded mighty good.

 

I enlisted the help of Nina and Pinta, although once my eldest heard that there were pears in the cake, she said that she would only help make it if she didn’t have to eat it. She hates fruit that much. She is a fruitophobe.

I got the process underway by gathering all the ingredients. I put the kids in the kitchen with the laptop and let them watch Bittman’s video over and over. Pinta kept saying “upside-down cake.”

Soon, it was time to cream the butter and the sugar. I squatted on the floor of our kitchen with Nina at my side. I had the mixer going in my right hand.  A stick of butter stood rigid across the bottle of the steel mixing bowl. Sugar was sprinkled about. The blades of the mixer dug into the butter, and started throwing off curled clumps. The more I pushed into the butter, the more the hand mixer protested. Nina was crouched next to me. She thought it looked like popcorn. She liked the way the curled bits of butter were jumping all over. I was concerned they’d jump out of the bowl. It felt like a humbling process, but that’s just because I hadn’t done it before, and I wasn’t confident that I was doing it correctly. It certainly didn’t look like I was doing it right.

Santa Maria said that she would have let the butter soften up. I wish she had told me that earlier, I thought. Pinta had been playing with the stick of butter and I took it away from her because she was softening it up. I could have let her play to her heart’s content.

Santa Maria taught me about combining the dry ingredients with the wet ones, and soon enough we had a cake. She adores a pear tart dessert at our favorite local restaurant, Al di La. It has chocolate in it, so, at the last minute, she stuck some pieces of dark chocolate in one corner of the batter.

Nina asked if the work was done, and then said she was going to lie down (she’d been running a fever all day). I started to make dinner—our seafood feast.

After the cake was in the oven, the kitchen started to smell very nice. It smelled like a cake was baking. Is there a kinder, more nurturing scent out there? 

 

We all loved the caramelized pears on top, but Santa Maria thought the chocolate was too bitter. Next time she would make it with semi-sweet chocolate. Nina didn’t eat any because she was too sick. Pinta had so much that her stomach ached. I downed two pieces and enjoyed every bite. Then I got a headache from the sugar.

Later that night I had to barricade Santa Maria from the kitchen because she was sneaking leftovers. She’s powerless over sweets and I knew drastic action needed to be taken. I quickly called up a dear friend who lives nearby to offer her some (she said that we were laughing so much on the phone that she thought there was alcohol in the cake) and then I left some more on the doorstep of our downstairs neighbors. They texted me the next day to say they found it upon coming home after a few drinks and that it was a pleasant surprise. They said they loved the Guinea Pig role.  

Not a bad outcome for my first cake, though to give credit where credit is due, it was a success because of Santa Maria, who helped to make it, like all the good and sweet things in my life, possible.

 

Adapted from Mark Bittman, whose original recipe is here.

 

 

Santa Maria’s Pear Upside-Down Cake

 

  • 11 Tablespoons butter
  • ¼ Cup packed brown sugar
  • 3 pears, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
  • 2/3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 ½ cups flour
  • 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ cup milk
  • optional: 1/3 cup (2 oz.) semi-sweet chocolate pieces (broken from a bar into whatever size you prefer)

 

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

 

Melt three tablespoons butter in a small pan over medium heat.

Add brown sugar and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves.

Bring to a boil and cook for two minutes.

Remove from heat and pour the mixture into a 9 ½ -inch baking pan.

Arrange the pear slices in the sugar mixture as you see fit.

In a mixing bowl, beat the remaining butter (one stick) and the sugar with a mixer until it is light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla and eggs and mix until smooth.

 

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Combine the wet (butter) and dry (flour) mixtures in three batches with the milk. And mix until barely combined. Do not over mix. Lumps are okay.

Carefully spread the cake batter on top of the pears using a spatula.

Bake in oven about 45 minutes, until top is golden. A thin sharp knife stuck in the cake should come out clean.

Let the cake sit for five minutes.

Run a knife around the edge of the cake pan.

Put a plate on top of the cake and carefully flip it so the plate is on the bottom and the pan is on top.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

Note: Fold chocolate pieces into the batter before baking for a slightly richer cake.