Name: Baked Pear for the Dessert Plate
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 45 min
Total time: 3 h
Yield: 8 people
Ingredients: 4 d’Anjou Pears ripe but not soft; double pie crust or make an easy vodka pie crust recipe; ½ cup dark brown sugar; ¼ cup pecans toasted and chopped; ½ teaspoon cinnamon; Pinch cardamom optional; Generous pinch kosher salt; 2 eggs; 1 teapoon milk; pinch kosher salt

For Baked Pear for the Dessert Plate, the counter starts with d’Anjou Pears ripe but not soft, double pie crust or make an easy vodka pie crust recipe, and dark brown sugar. Portion it for 8 people.

Count on 30 minutes of prep, 45 minutes of cooking, 2 hours of resting, about 3 hours from the first measurement to the plate.

Ingredients Method

What goes in the bowl

For the pears

4 d’Anjou Pears ripe but not soft
double pie crust or make an easy vodka pie crust recipe
½ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup pecans toasted and chopped
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch cardamom optional
Generous pinch kosher salt

For the Egg Wash

2 eggs
1 teapoon milk
pinch kosher salt

How the cooking goes

Make your egg-wash by beating together all the ingredients with a whisk or, a reliable, a hand-blender. A hand-blender makes it perfectly smooth and homogenous.
Mix together sugar, pecans and spices in a small mixing bowl.
Core the pears from the bottom, leaving the stem and top in tact. The easiest way to do this is with a melon-baller – just keep scooping from the bottom until all the seeds are gone!
Fill pears with the brown sugar mixture. Stuff as much in there as you can!
Roll out your pastry until it is 1/8 inch thick. You worked with half of the dough at one time. The size that you roll it out really depends on the size of your pears. the pears were gargantuan, so you rolled mine out into a 7-inch square.
Set a pear in the center of your square and cut a slit in the dough at each corner until it almost reaches the pear.
Pick up one corner and begin wrapping the pear; egg wash one side and layer the second corner on top of the first piece of dough; press down firmly. You can press down the bottom more firmly, which will help keep all that delicious filling inside instead of on your sheet pan. Repeat until the whole pear is covered. You can stretch the dough a little if it doesn’t quite fit or cut off a piece of scrap dough and fill in any gap that remains when you are finished.
You re-rolled the scraps of the first half of dough to cover the second pear and then repeated with the second half of the dough. If your pears are small enough, you can probably get 2 squares out of each rolling and there will be no need to re-roll scraps.
You cut little decorative leaves out of the scraps. Adhere any decorations with a little egg wash.
Refrigerate pears 2 hours or overnight. This will ensure your pastry is flaky!
Heat the oven to 400°F (204°C) and prepare a sheet pan with baking paper.
Brush the entire surface of the wrapped pear with a thin coat of egg wash and sprinkle generously with sugar.
Oven-bake at 400°F for 10 minutes then reduce oven temperature to 350°F (176°C) until the pastry is a deep gold and you cannot see any more raw dough in the seams, approximately 15 – 20 minutes more.