A nice pear

Today’s experiment is going to be a cake again. There is a pear tree in the garden which is starting to shed its pears. If you look at the picture above you can see the tree. Yesterday we had some torrential rain which I think helped some of them on their way. In order to use some of them and to save the garden being full of drunken wasps I decided to make a pear and ginger sponge pudding. Waste not want not


I used my usual 6oz (170gms) of butter, sugar and self raising flour with three eggs. In the past I have whacked all of the ingredients into a food processor and whizzed them for about 30 to 40 seconds with no ill effects. However, today I used a hand whisk. I also added a teaspoon full of ground ginger to the flour as I folded it in. The pears were not the best specimens that I have ever seen but they were free so hey, let’s getting cooking!

I peeled them and took slices from the outside as the middles were a bit on the iffy side. Having carefully sifted through the pear slices for any extra protein from any bugs that had been foolish enough not to jump off before I put the pear in a bowl and brought them into the kitchen, I then mixed two dessert spoons of ginger preserve in with the pears. I thought that this would enhance the gingeriness of the sponge and would sweeten some of the pears as many were not quite ripe. I suppose that if you were to do this recipe yourself you would need four medium pears. I then spooned the sponge on top of the pear mix.

I cooked the sponge at 190 for about 50 minutes. I have a dodgy cooker at the moment; it is in dire need of a service. One of the elements on the grill has gone and the fan in the little oven doesn’t always start up. I have had to stop using it since I found it in nuclear melt down the other night when I hadn’t noticed that the fan was not going round. Trust me, fan ovens don’t like to be on without their fans are on as well.

The sponge turned out well,, except I think it either needed more ground ginger in the sponge, or I need to buy some new ground ginger. I suspect it is a tad out of date as it is not something I use a great deal of. Apart from that it was nice. I thought that the ginger preserve worked well with the pears.