This year, Christmas Eve (and rest of the holidays) I’ll spend outside the home. I don’t have the opportunity to devise festive menus and, being completely honest, it does not keep me awake at night.
The only thing I will be doing for Christmas, it kutia. The recipe soon.
In the meantime, I play in the kitchen when planning a family „after holiday” dinner. I began, of course, with dessert. Customary dessert is a cake, sometimes jelly or cookies. And I wanted pears. I, literally, dreamt about them. There isn’t more winter fruit – pear is the queen of winter. Sweet, juicy, slightly grainy flesh hidden under green-yellow-brown skin. Inconspicuous. Underestimated. Always in the shadow of apple.
I went a little shortcut, using ready-made puff pastry, but the previous week was a stream of constant setbacks and minor accidents. I didn’t want pears to fell another victims to bad luck.
For he syrup I used the cane syrup. You can replace it with honey, but then you may find that you need more sugar.
I also believe that adding pepper to syrup was a stroke of genius. Pepper and cardamom blend wonderfully (not to mention the fantastic aromas).
I’m not sure pears fits into all of diet and intolerance of all participants to a family dinner, but I assure you that this is a wonderful dessert.
Certainly not vegan (puff pastry and optional egg spreads), definitely very sweet (syrup, cane sugar), but it’s worth to make it and surprise your family, even without any occasion. Although, as the culmination Christmas dinner, pears are perfect.
I wish you a merry dessert!
Ingredients:
2 pears (if you want 4 pears, are the ingredients of syrup should be multiplied by 2)
puff pastry
egg yolk with water for brushing (optional) 
syrup:
2 cups of water (200 ml)
1 cup sugar
0.5 cups of cane syrup
50 ml liqueur jasmine
1 lime
2 cinnamon sticks
1 teaspoon cardamom pods (black)
0.5 tsp coarsely ground pepper
Preparation:
- Peel the pears, but leave the steams. Cut out the cores from the bottom.
- Peel lime zest and the lime cut in half.
- Translate into a saucepan all syrup ingredients and grated lime zest. Bring it to boil. Then reduce the heat and put pears into the boiling syrup – cook for approx. 20 minutes (in half the time we can reverse the pears to evenly soaked with syrup).
- Remove pears to be cooled.
- Remove lime halves and cinnamon sticks. The rest of the syrup cook until it thickens (approx. 15 – 20 minutes).
- Puff pastry cut into 2cm strips and leaves for garnishing.
- Each pear wrap in stripes of pastry. Add leaf to each one.
Brush with egg yolk (optional). - Bake in the oven preheated to 220C (428F), about 20 minutes. Cover top of the pears with aluminum foil to prevent scorching.
Before serving, pour the hot, thicken syrup.
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