Spooky Chocolate-Almond Pear Tart

It’s spooky season! As you may recall, I enjoy making fun Halloween treats, especially when there are parties I can bring them to. While I don’t have any particularly fancy Halloween plans this year, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun with themed desserts– and this one is totally worth the effort!

I admit that I shamelessly lifted the idea (at least visually) from this Grim Reaper Galette from Ghoul At Heart, but since I didn’t have an entire bottle of Chambord to soak my pears in, and because I love the combination of pears and almonds, I decided to go in a different direction for the details. This tart uses a chocolate pate sucree, filled with chocolate frangipane and red wine-poached pear skulls. (Note: since I had extra ingredients I made some mini tartlets and spread some raspberry jam into the bottom of the crust before filling them– a tasty variation!)

The skulls were surprisingly easy to make– I used red D’Anjou pears, on the firm side to ensure that they didn’t fall apart, peeled, halved, and cored. I used a 1/4 tsp. measuring spoon to scoop out the eyes, and the tip of a paring knife to cut the nose and teeth. I poached the pears in a bottle of (cheap) red wine with an entertainingly goth-y label– you really don’t need to get the good stuff, since you’re pouring in sugar anyway! I will note that the pears don’t look all that red while in the wine bath (which worried me– I really wanted the color to pop), but once you take them out the color really comes through. And once they’re baked, they get even darker.

The finished tart was gothically gorgeous, not to mention delicious! The tart crust is almost cookie-like, while the frangipane filling is like a gooey brownie surrounding the boozy pears. Drizzled with a little red wine syrup (disturbingly blood-like), this dessert will be a fabulous finish to any Halloween dinner party!

I will note that there’s a decent amount of down time for this tart– your butter has to come to room temperature for the crust and frangipane, the crust needs time to rest and chill before rolling out, then more time to chill before baking. Then you need to blind bake and cool it the shell, and your poached pears need to be thoroughly chilled before assembling and baking the final tart. I split the work over two days, making my tart dough and pear skulls the night before and wrapping them in plastic to chill overnight, then making the frangipane and baking the tart the next day. If you want to serve this in the evening, get started in the morning to make sure everything is ready.

Honey-Cardamom Pear Tartlets

Recently, I was trying to figure out what dessert to bring to a Lunar New Year party. More specifically, I was trying to figure out what dessert to bring that was not red bean cream puffs, because I didn’t want to go to the trouble of making the craquelin topping and I still needed something bite-sized and tasty. I was going through my old recipes when I came across my post about honey-cornflake crunchies and it occurred to me that they might make a neat base for a different kind of dessert combining honey with some other flavor components.

I decided to flavor my filling with cardamom, since it’s often paired with honey. I’d originally planned to make a simple stabilized whipped cream filling, but concluded that it would be too light in comparison to the crunchy base and opted instead to give it a richer mouthfeel by combining two concepts– stabilized whipped cream and cooked-flour frosting. Both involve beating a thickened pudding-like mixture into the dairy– it’s just that the frosting uses butter instead of liquid cream. My experimental recipe worked beautifully, and I’ll definitely be using it in the future.

Of course, once I’d settled on cream-filled tartlets, I felt that they needed something more, for texture, and flavor. After a false start (persimmons apparently just went out of season, boo!) I settled on pears and pistachios, both classic pairings with cardamom.

Chocolate Pear Cake, Take 1: Reasonably Good

A friend of mine is currently forbidden to ingest dairy at all (which is a shame because she loves cheese), so I decided to bake her a cake. Ordinarily I would just go with my standard chocolate cake recipe (naturally dairy- and egg-free), but no dairy means no frosting, no ganache, no whipped cream, nothing! So the cake would have to have a little extra oomph to it to make up for the lack of topping.

I’d previously bookmarked a recipe for a chocolate cake with poached pears baked inside, which sounded delicious, but the cake part looked a lot moister and denser than my standard recipe, which usually requires butter to achieve. I decided, therefore, to try to enrich my usual recipe with the addition of two eggs. Also, instead of poaching my own pears (fussy, tedious, and ultimately the delicate flavors of the poached pears would be drowned in chocolate) I opted for canned pears.

Results? Not bad. Even with the eggs, though, the cake without frosting lacked richness, and the pears were too soft (and too sparse) to stand up well to the cake. I think next time I make a chocolate-pear cake I’ll use raw pears, probably whole and cored so they can stand up in the pan and aren’t confined to the bottom of the cake. And perhaps next time I’ll use a cake recipe that involves butter and just substitute margarine, so my friend can partake despite her dairy problems.

Dessert Poutine with Miso

Recently my husband and I took part in a little friendly competition with a few other couples for a mutual friend’s birthday, which involved her naming an ingredient and the rest of us coming up with dishes incorporating the ingredient, to bring to her birthday dinner. She selected miso, which was a brilliant idea, as miso can be used in so many applications, sweet and savory. Some of the contributions that evening included miso-marinated steak, miso-caramel ice cream, and miso-pork stuffed steamed buns. Delicious!

But how does this relate to poutine, you ask? Well, for reasons left unexplained, bonus points were awarded for Canadian-themed dishes, and what’s more stereotypically Canadian than poutine?