Pears & Almonds

Hello everyone!

Autumn has well and truly arrived in Luxembourg. It’s rainy, foggy, and chilly, which makes me happy to stay inside and bake. A part of me loves autumn for the changing leaves, sweaters, boots, and warm drinks, but part of me really does miss the warm summer days.

Last week, I tried to stick to my updating schedule (once a week) even though I hadn’t baked. That turned out to be a bit of a flop, as you lovely people seem to be more interested in my actual baking products than the tools that help me along the way. That’s totally fine, but it does mean there might be the odd week where there is no update because I haven’t baked anything worth posting about.

So without further ado, here we go with some pear and almond cupcakes.

The recipe is from the book Cupcakes Galore by Gail Wagman, and I mainly wanted to try it out because it looked delicious and I had some pears that needed to be eaten/cooked this weekend.

The batter was easy to mix up, and included ground almonds as a partial flour substitute, which I always find interesting. It doesn’t alter the consistency very much, and provides extra taste.

     

Originally, the recipe is for making jumbo cupcakes. As I don’t have a jumbo cupcake pan, only a regular one, I made regular-sized cupcakes. When it came to cutting the pears into quarters and pressing them into the cupcakes, the quarters had to be rather small. But no pear went to waste, for the parts I cut off, I ate ^_^

The recipe did not include an icing recipe; rather, it called for making caramelized almond slivers, to top the finished cupcakes. So, I cooked these, and ended up with PLENTY to spare:

I am definitely making a note in the book that the topping can be halved! Since I had so many, and I didn’t want any to go to waste, I deviated from the original recipe, and whipped up a small batch of almond buttercream frosting. This was also because the cupcakes didn’t look very pretty with just some sprinkled almonds over the top, and the pear sticking out. By covering it with the buttercream, I provided a sticky surface for (some) of the caramelized almonds to stick to, and generally upped the appearance of the whole cupcake.

And finally, I took a leaf out of Theresa Helmer’s book. She is a cook and food photographer I follow on deviantART, and her presentations are always so beautiful. I had a few autumn accessories on hand, so I decided to set up my finished cupcakes with a bit more flourish than usual.

Thanks for reading!