#7 Caramelized Pear Bread Pudding

I was really excited about this one. It says that Challah and brioche are the best bases for this recipe, and I love to have an excuse to make a batch of challah. I have a yummy recipe that I blogged about last year. I repeated this and had enough to eat fresh and as french toast over the weekend in addition to using it for this big recipe!

Pudding ingredients

Eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt

whisked

Some milk to whisk in

Whisked

Soaking the bread cubes (overnight)

After turning them once

Vanilla Sauce ingredients

Warming the milk

Yolks, salt, and sugar

With some hot milk added to the egg mixture

Egg mixture in the main pan and continuing to cook

Bubbling up!

Straining into a bowl over an ice bath

the result looked pretty eggy, not sure if it was supposed to look like that…

After adding the vanilla

And then the brandy

Caramelized pear ingredients

Melting the butter

Melted and with some sugar sprinkled on top

Pears a-cooking

Nice and steamy

After flipping them

Soaked bread spread into the baking dish

I left them on the pan a bit too long, and they blackened a bit. They didn’t smell or taste bad but they weren’t as they should have been

Pears on top of the bread pudding!

Baked fresh out of the oven

Baked pears

With the vanilla sauce on it.

This one was very delicious although next time I would be more careful with the caramelization of the pears. It had a *little* too much of a burnt taste.

#6 Apple Crisp with Brandy-soaked Currants

So far there have been a lot of apples, but I knew this one would be good. It’s hard to screw up apple crisp. There are no complicated crusts, nothing difficult that by messing up, could ruin it. I challenge someone to attempt a crisp and fail miserably.

 

Soaking the currants in brandy

The sliced apples

The crisp ingredients

Dry ingredients measured out

whisked together

melted butter added in (this was then frozen while the rest was prepared)

sugar and flour to mix with the apple slices

On the apples

Mixed up

Into the pan

Currants sprinkled on top

Crisp, sprinkled on top of the apples/currants

Baked

This one was SO good. No leftovers, yum yum yum.

#5 Cranberry Buckle with Vanilla Crumb

I had the pleasure of making this dessert for a couple good friends of ours. We hadn’t seen them in weeks, and George behaved so well while they were here, we were able to enjoy an adult dinner, dessert, and game of Ticket To Ride. I won. This dessert must have made me lucky 😉

What is a “buckle” you ask? Well I would choose to describe it as a blend between coffee cake and berry muffins. The term buckle comes from the action the berries take during baking. They “buckle”, breaking down so that they ooze their yummy juices, which permeates into the cake. It is quite delicious.

Vanilla Crumb ingredients

All but the vanilla

With the vanilla

Buckle ingredients

Dry ingredients mixed

Butter, sugar, and orange zest

Blended

After the eggs

After adding the dry mixture and sour cream

After folding in half the cranberries

Spread into the pan

Berries atop

Vanilla crumb sprinkled on

Baked

Close-up

Done

#4 Apple Pandowdy

This recipe taught me what a “pandowdy” is. Very much like a cobbler or a pie, it is fruit on the bottom with a thick later of biscuit “crust” over the top, rolling with the fruit it tops. The image from the cover of the book is in fact a pandowdy.

It was very easy to make, much easier than a pie because the crust that overlays the top was simpler than a pie crust. Which is a good thing because I was in a great hurry! So much that I forgot to take half the pictures. 😛

I apparently forgot to take a picture of the ingredients! Here are the dry ingredients mixed, just flour, sugar, and salt.

Cold butter tossed in

After a lot of work, the butter was fully blended in with a pastry blender

After adding milk and shaping it into a ball/square

Tossing the apples with cinnamon, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and vanilla.

After rolling out the dough to a diameter just shy of the size of the pan, this is the pandowdy fully baked and cooling, ready to eat with some vanilla ice cream 🙂 I might add some turbinado sugar to the top of the dough next time

It was very yummy with some ice cream. A great alternative to apple pie if you’re not up for dealing with the complications of crust, pandowdies are much simpler and easier.

#3 Apple Custard Pie with Orange

This recipe sounded a little weird to me, but I wanted to try something pie-like since I’d already made two that were cake. I am so glad I made this one, it disappeared so fast due to it’s deliciousness. I was happy to find that the crust recipe was basically identical to my standby recipe, with a few tips and subtle changes in the directions that (surprisingly) made a big difference in the outcome.

Crust ingredients (the lemon juice was a new one to me)

Dry ingredients mixed together, and then frozen!

VERY COLD butter cubes tossed in

Processed until the butter was pea-sized

Ice lemon-water (catching onto the coldness of this recipe?)

A little water added

I tried shaping this into a disc but it required a little more liquid

With the slightly extra liquid added and shaped into this disc

To make the edges keep from looking crumby, I roll it out almost to pie-pan size and then shape it back into a disc and re-roll it.

I poked the bottom with fork tines because last time I pre-baked a crust it puffed up and shaped itself weirdly

with “weights” for the pre-baking

Pre-baked!

Pie-filling ingredients

Sliced apples, orange juice, and sugar (I accidentally added the orange zest to this before tossing it together, that’s why you see little bits of zest in there)

Eggs, sugar, and zest

Whisked together

With the spices added

Blended in

After adding the milk and cream.

Apples in the pre-baked crust, ready to bake a bit

Apples baked and custard added

Sugar added to the custard pie

Baked, fresh out of the oven

The final product, after cooling a bit

This was a great dessert. I omitted the optional orange oil (I knew I wouldn’t be able to find it anywhere considering how hard it was to find the lime oil in the Daffodil Cake, which turned out to not be too worth it), and since it was optional I felt fine skipping it. The orange zest was the perfect amount of citrus flavor for this one, it made an extremely lovely dessert for our group and I took an empty pie-plate home!