The Recipe Room

If frozen berries and white chocolate make a nice pairing, I think that the combination of pears and white chocolate is pretty divine, especially when the white chocolate sauce contains a little liqueur.  What a nice way to round off a special meal!

 

March is the last month of the pear season in the UK.  You can still find lots of delicious varieties out there.  Poached pears with a hot white chocolate liqueur sauce uses Conference pears.  This fruit is one of my personal favourites.  Pears have a special kind of sweetness and when ripe, a great softness, although pears also have that distinctive slightly gritty texture to them.  Apparently, when they are picked early and ripen off the tree, that gritty texture is less prevalent.

What you need:

• 6 conference pears, stalks in place, peeled
• 85g Demerara sugar
• 3 tbsp honey, runny and clear
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder
• A few drops of vanilla essence
• 450ml white wine
• 255g white chocolate, broken into small pieces
• 120g butter, unsalted
• 4-6 tbsp white chocolate liqueur

What to do:

1. In a deep and heavy-based saucepan, add the white wine, cinnamon, vanilla essence and honey, and bring the mixture up to a gentle simmer.  Add the pears and turn the heat down to low, poaching the pears for about half an hour or until they are translucent in appearance.  Turn the pears over every now and then during poaching.
2. Whilst the pears are cooking, you can get going with the white chocolate liqueur sauce.  Gently melt the white chocolate and the butter together in a separate pan.  When molten and combined, remove from the heat and stir in the white chocolate liqueur.
3. Once the pears are translucent and soft, remove them from the saucepan and place them in the serving bowls, then reduce the white wine mixture to a third of its quantity.
4. Pour some of the white wine reduction over each pear before pouring on the white chocolate sauce.

If you want to be really decadent, you can make a milk chocolate sauce as well. Take 255g of milk chocolate in small pieces and 120g of butter. As with the white chocolate sauce, stir together over a low heat until it is all molten and combined. Pour on top of the pears after the wine reduction and before the white chocolate.

Less than 30 minutes to prepare and 30 minutes to 1 hour to cook

Makes: 6 puddings

Tags: chocolate liqueur, cinnamon powder, conference pears, honey, pear pudding, pear recipe, Poached Pears with a Hot White Chocolate Liqueur Sauce, seasonal food, sugar, unsalted butter, vanilla essence, white chocolate, white wine

This entry was posted on Friday, 30 March, 2012 at 10:41 am by Toni Simpson and is filed under Desserts, Less than 90 mins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment, or make a trackback from your own blog.