What I Ate: 09-04-12

Pear Pudding

We have been abundantly blessed with lots of fruits and veggies from friends and family lately. Especially pears. I simply adore pears! Lucky for me, my mother-in-law isn't a huge fan, but her mother-in-law who happens to live next door, has a pear tree so the two huge buckets of pears that ended up in my in-law's garage ultimately ended up in my tummy, for the most part. :}

Of the last installment that we acquired from them, a few of them were really, really ripe, so I knew I'd need to use these ones immediately rather then eat them at my leisure, so I started searching around on Pinterest on Tuesday for a nice, doable pear recipe.
My first thought was pear butter, but in the end, I didn't really have everything I needed for that so I kept looking and managed to find this simple Pear Pudding recipe on Foodnetwork.com.  They didn't have a picture so after pinning the recipe I determined that if it turned out at all that I would post a picture here to add to my pin.

First time I ever made a recipe that called for a water bath. Oo la la! Fancy!

I changed the recipe a tad by substituting the sugar for raw honey. Also,1 teaspoon of cinnamon seemed like a lot. I wanted it to taste more like pear than cinnamon so I only added a dash or two. I also didn't have a lemon, but I did have a fresh lime so I substituted lime zest for lemon. I did use organic butter on the pan, though mine was salted instead of unsalted. I honestly never buy unsalted, and I've never had a problem with stuff turning out too salty. The last change I made was that I didn't have any breadcrumbs (sounded kinda gross to me anyway) so I crushed up the last of the health food store graham crackers that I'd purchased for our camping trip last weekend (for healthy-ish s'mores.)

 Anyway, it seems like it turned out okay. It never really set up to be very thick. Perhaps I should have baked it longer than recommended. It was quite golden around the edges though. It would have been nice if the recipe had mentioned whether or not I should test it with a knife or something. It said 'serve cool or chilled' so I chilled it for almost an hour thinking maybe that would help it thicken. Of course, the whole reason it was still a bit runny could have been due to the fact that I used honey instead of sugar. 
At any rate. It was deee-licious!

Sweet and kinda rich but sort of light at the same time. The taste was just so perfectly balanced, it's hard to describe. I loved the pear flavor and I do not regret cutting back on the cinnamon at all. Not that I have anything against cinnamon, and maybe if I do this again I'll try the full amount, but I just wasn't in the mood for a cinnamon dessert. I wanted a fresher, fruitier flavored dessert. And that's exactly what I got. Yay!