Tag Archives: spread

Quick (and delicious) Pear Butter

I don’t think I’ve made anything this simple that noentheless made such an impact and left such an impression at the table. That is true efficiency!

All you need are:

  • 1 kg of good pears, not yet too ripe
  • juice of a lemon half
  • vanilla pulp from two beans (?), and those beans themselves
  • one stick of cinnamon
  • 500 g of caster sugar
  • and if you are of that particularly persuasion, a small piece of ginger

The process is as simple as can be.

Prepare your ingredients by peeling and dicing the pears, cleaning and chopping the ginger and scraping out the vanilla pulp.
Put everything minus the pears, but plus 100 ml of water into  a pot and let boil for a minute. Add the pears and simmer at medium heat until they’re soft.

Prepare your canning jars.

Remove vanilla beans and cinnamon stick before mashing up things with your immersion blender. Add the sugar and cook the mixture at a rolling boil for a minute or two.

Pour the (hopefully) slushy Pear Butter into your prepared jars, close immediately and turn them upside down for at least five minutes.

 

The resulting Pear Butter tastes incredible, all by itself, on fresh white bread, or on butter, or – my personal favourite – on cream cheese! Yummy in the extreme. And a tiny bit Christmas-y for the intense vanilla and cinnamon notes…
The next time I’ll use this recipe, I’ll try and make my butter a little bit more creamy, though; it stayed a bit too liquid this time round and tends to run off the bread when I’m not looking 😉

Hazelnut Spread

Last night I decided to try a super simple recipe for hazelnut spread, usually called Nutella over here, with my glass worth of hazelnuts.

The first step was placing them on a baking tray to roast, which I did alongside some oven schnitzel.
I admit I was completely unprepared for what excellence happens to hazelnuts when you roast them!!! Never having had freshly roasted hazelnuts before, I still marvel at the difference from those you get at the shops. They smelled so lovely, and tasted even better. Continue reading Hazelnut Spread