To back up a bit: Josh has recently decided that he wants to create his own hard cider. There have been many strange boxes of equipment shipped to our home in the last couple of months, lots of over-sized glass bottles, and a newly acquired (and malfunctioning) full-size freezer. I'm afraid to step foot into the workshop in our backyard because I'm pretty sure it must resemble some kind of scary science experiment with tubes and hoses and dry ice and beakers.
This weekend I presume that the workshop/brewhouse must be just about up to Josh's brewing standards, as we made a special trip to the orchards down in Willcox to procure fruit and cider. [And delicious apple cider donuts, although that was entirely for my own appetite and had nothing to do with brewing hard cider.] Josh figured out that he would be able to purchase unpasteurized apple cider without having to do the dirty work of pressing the apples himself, so we didn't actually buy any apples. We did, however, buy about 25 pounds of Asian pears. I love pears. And given my recent promise to try more baking, I decided to make something yummy with some of the freshly-picked fruit.
At first, I thought that I would try to make a pear pie. Most of the recipes that I could find online for pear pie seemed to basically be a variation of a standard apple pie, and honestly, that didn't interest me. So then I found a simple recipe for "pear cake". With a few tweaks of my own, I made what I am going to call a CinnaPearNut Bread. With frosting, I might call it a cake. But without frosting, and with a consistency similar to banana bread... it's a bread, not a cake. And either way, it's delicious. Find the recipe below.
The only things I might change about this bread would be to add more cinnamon, use pears that are a little bit more ripe for a bigger flavor, and to chop (but not puree) the pears and walnuts. I think bigger pieces of fruit and nut would be good. Overall though, I'm proud of this first attempt. It's moist and sweet, but still pretty subtle. (Look at me, trying to sound like some kind of uppity food person. Ha!)
I'm pretty excited to smear some Nutella on a slice of this stuff for breakfast.
(As for the original part of this post, Josh bottled up some of his cider tonight and did some mad-scientist-y kinds of things in the workshop. I don't know how long this process takes, but presumably there will be drinkable hard cider in some amount of weeks. I'll report back about that later.)
CinnaPearNut Bread
Ingredients
4-5 fresh pears
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 big handful crumbled walnuts
1 tablespoon cinnamon (not sure how much I used exactly, but it was a lot...)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Directions
1. Peel and thinly slice pears. Mix pears with white sugar, brown sugar, nuts, and cinnamon. Let sit for 1-2 hours, then puree in a blender (you may opt to skip the puree step... I did it this time, but probably will choose to leave it chunky next time!).
2. Preheat oven to 350 and prep either a cake pan or a couple of bread loaf pans (I used bread pans, and it worked really well).
3. Stir (by hand) the flour, salt, and baking soda until mixed. Add these dry ingredients to the pear mixture and also add the oil, vanilla, and eggs- mixing by hand until evenly blended.
4. Pour batter into prepared pan, and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 45 minutes to an hour (keep an eye on it- I originally set a timer for an hour, but everything was done after 45).
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