Ripe pears are like buses. You wait ages for them to reach the perfect ripeness and then they all go ripe at once. Or, if you’re like me, you happen across a whole swag of perfectly juicy Doyenne du Comice pears at the green grocer and you buy a whole bagful. This is what you should do with the ones you don’t eat standing over the kitchen sink as the juice runs down your forearms.
Gingery Pear Loaf
This is barely adapted from a Michael Lee-Richards recipe, snipped from a North and South in 1998. It’s the easiest cake in the world to make, leaves you with just one pot to wash up and doesn’t require icing. Oh, and it tastes amazing hot or cold. It’s probably one of my favourite cakes of all-time (and, despite appearances, I’m quite fussy).
125g butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cups plain flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 large pears, peeled, cored and diced
3/4 cup crystallised ginger, chopped
Preheat the oven to 150C. Grease and line a loaf tin or a 23cm ring tin.
Melt the butter in a large pot over low heat and set aside while you get everything else ready.
Tip all the remaining ingredients into the butter and stir well. Scrape this mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 45-55 minutes, until golden and crusty on top (and cooked in the middle – give it the skewer test to be sure).
Leave in the tin to cool for 10 minutes, then carefully turn out to a rack to cool.
Have a sweet, sweet weekend, everyone. Don’t forget to get your entry in for this month’s We Should Cocoa – you have until the end of Monday, NZ time.
I absolutely adore pear and ginger combination – so great and this loaf looks simply delicious
mary x
I'm actually drooling over the crystallized ginger chunks!
Pear and ginger are heavenly together – I must give this recipe a try !!
So delicious! Ginger is one of the greatest ingredients in the kitchen, love it! Have a sweet, sweet weekend too!
This looks like a fantastic recipe – great for a dinner party too when you want something rustic (and you'd get the added benefit of ginger to aid digestion, lol!). Eeeek I had forgotten about the chocolate coffee challenge – but I have something planned, he he! Thanks for the reminder. Becks xxx
they certainly are like buses, hard one minute then a non stop fress the next, great way to use them up.
Really nice combination of flavours. Right now I fancy a piece with some custard. That's not too odd hopefully.
I can see that this would be a good one. I never think to bake with pears. Maybe because good pears are hard to come by. What a scoop to find such delicious ripe pears.
Beautiful combination! Now to find someone with a pear tree!
Lucy, we'd love to send you some of our Angelys pears to try: they have a melting fine flesh, smooth taste and are dense so good to cook with. This is the first significant crop and Angelys is really set to revitalise the NZ pear industry. Email smcrae@freshmax.co.nz to let me know your details. Kind Regards Sarah
I have made this loaf following this recipe. It was delicious! Everyone loved it! As the baker, however, I have several questions. I am in Canada where our stoves are still in Imperial measure which means that 150C is 300F. That is very low for baking a loaf. I had to add extra baking time; 55 minutes was not enough. Was there an error in the temperature given or is there a difference in the ovens that must be accounted for? My other question is why are the measurements for the ingredients in a combination of Imperial and metric? 125 g of butter (not very much) yet the rest of the ingredients are in imperial? I have passed this recipe on to others who have had the same questions and difficulties. Please help your Canadian baking afficiandos!
Author
Hi Lorraine, thanks for getting in touch. I’m glad you liked the loaf – it’s still one of my favourites. The low oven temperature is correct, though it probably wouldn’t hurt to raise it slightly (say to 160C – 320F).
The amount of butter is correct – New Zealand uses metric measurements (hence the butter is measured in grams), though received wisdom is that ‘most people’ use cup and spoon measures for dry ingredients. When I write my newspaper columns I use cup and spoon measurements where possible. The recipes on this blog will be a mixture of these measurements and weights, reflecting the way I cook at home (and there’s probably a shift towards measuring by weight since I got some whizz-bang digital scales a couple of years ago). Hope that helps!