Apple Pear Crisp

Chopped apples and pears from earlier in Dec and frozen.

Cooked it down til it was soft and mushy. Turns out, pears are not so great at being frozen, then cooked, as it gets really mushed. At least apples still hold their shape... Added sugar, butter, and other good stuff... Check out the apple crisp recipe here.

Made the crisp part with grape nut cereal, oats, sugar, n butter.

Wasn't too shabby considering the pear disintegrated. It turned out to be apples in pear sauce sort of crisp, so still tasty! :)

Lemon Pudding Cake

So my dad had just given me a small bag of huge lemons from his dwarf lemon tree. We hardly just lemons, so it usually just sit around the kitchen. And then my hubby's boss gives us a huge bag of more lemons. I thought, "What to do with all these lemons?!?," searched the web and settled on this recipe because it looked different. Lo and behold! It only called for 1 lemon. -_- 

"In a medium bowl, whisk 3/4 cup granulated sugar with 1/3 cup all-purpose flour. In another bowl, whisk 3 large egg yolks with 2 tablespoons unsalted butter until well blended. Whisk in 1 cup milk, 

1. 5 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest. Pour the lemon mixture into the sugar mixture and whisk until smooth." For those that know me, I used the kitchenaid thingy as we don't have any hand whisk... I just hate washing those...

"In a medium bowl, beat the 3 large egg whites with 1/4 teaspoon salt  until firm peaks form." If I remember correctly, this took 15 minutes. I was running out of time before people showed up so the peak isn't all that firm...

"Gently fold the egg whites into the lemon mixture." I then poured the batter into a Pam'd silicon thing that had 12 rectangles. I thought it'd look like a cute mini cake. A bit too mini for my liking. Poured the batter in half way cuz I thought it would rise, it did very little, then when I refrigerated it so it could cool, the rise deflated... Then placed it in a pan. "Place the silicon pan in the oven and pour in enough hot water [in the pan] to reach halfway up the sides of the [silicone pan]."

"Bake the pudding cakes for 35 minutes or until they are puffy and golden on top."

Ta-da!

Served with whip cream and ice cream. Twas light and refreshing! The texture took getting used to though. It was like half moist cake, half pudding. 

I was thinking it'd be a great batter for those fruit tart desserts.

Apple Crisp

Time for an apple crisp! I made it similarly to the Persimmon Apple Crisp and Pear Crisp. So easy!

I used 5 apples. 2 reds, 2 greens and 1 yellow.

The apples are all chopped and added to a pan with a 1/4 cup of butter.

Added a bunch of sugar and spice. More specifically, 2 tbs sugar, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp cloves, and a generous pinch of salt.

Here, the apples are almost done. In a small bowl, I mixed about a 1 tsp of cornstarch with 1/4 cup water and poured it into the liquids and stirred it all up.

For the crisp part on top, I totally cheated. Buahahaha. :o) I had hubby squash 3 of the oats n honey bars. See, it's easy!

Apples are all cooked and deliciously soft. Note, you should taste test your apples every now and then. I didn't want my apple crisp overly sweet so the 2 tbs were just fine for me.

Place the cooked apples in a pie dish. Add the crumbled oats bar on top. Baked in preheated oven of 375 F for 10 minutes just to brown the top.

Ta-da! 

PS: pics were taken from my phone so not the usual quality...

Apple Butter

I finally made apple butter! Sadly, no pictures. :(  But it's awfully similar to the persimmon butter method via slow cooker. Easy peasy. Here's what I used:

5 red apples
4 yellow apples
3 granny smiths
1/4 cup water
1 tbs vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbs cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pumpkin spice
1/2 tsp ground gloves
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Peel, core, quarter and chop all the apples. Place in slow cooker. Add water and vanilla extract. Add in the remaining ingredients. Mix it as best as you can. Cook on high for 4 hours uncovered, stirring at least every hour to ensure it doesn't burn. Once the apples are soft, I used a hand blender and pureed it. Afterwards, it cooked on low heat, uncovered, stirring occasionally. Once thickened, the sauce was canned. Yummy! :D

Pineapple Butter / Pineapple Sauce

So, after making persimmon butter and pear butter successfully, le hubby had the amazing idea of taking any fruit and turning it into "butter." In the grocery store, he pointed out to plums, blueberries, then pineapples. I said no to the plums and blueberries because the butter would be more like a sauce or a jam. But, when he pointed out the pineapples, I said, "Hrm, sure. That just could work." So we grabbed a couple of pineapples and when we went home, I looked up a recipe. I used this one as a guideline: Pineapple Butter with Cardamom and Vanilla.

Ingredients that I used: 2 lbs freshly chopped pineapples, 2 cups chopped pears, 3 tbs lemon juice, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1 cup water, and 2 tbs brown sugar (not shown).

Place all ingredients into a pot and cook until the fruits are soft.

All soft!

Took a hand blender and pureed it. It's pineapple-sauce!!

Cook a little longer....

Looks pretty thick. Pretty sure it's pineapple butter! :)

And canned! Twas mm-mmmm goood! And the taste is very exotic and tropical-like! Totally reminds me of hawaii. 

Angel Food Cake

We had quite a few eggwhites left over from all the homemade custards we were making. What to do with the eggwhites? Le hubby answered that with angel food cake! He found Alton Brown's recipe and away [to the kitchen] I went.

Ingredients
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup cake flour
12 egg whites (the closer to room temperature the better)
1/3 cup warm water
1 teaspoon orange extract, or extract of your choice
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F.

In a food processor spin sugar about 2 minutes until it is superfine. I skipped this part. Sift half of the sugar with the salt and the cake flour, setting the remaining sugar aside.

In a large bowl (I used my stand mixer's bowl), use a balloon whisk to thoroughly combine egg whites, water, orange extract, and cream of tartar. 

After 2 minutes, switch to a hand mixer. Slowly sift the reserved sugar, beating continuously at medium speed. 

What I assumed "medium peaks" to be. FYI: The dripping stayed up, it didn't fall off the whisk.

Once you have achieved medium peaks, sift enough of the flour mixture in to dust the top of the foam. Using a spatula fold in gently. Continue until all of the flour mixture is incorporated. As you can see, my flour/sugar mix was not sifted...

Carefully spoon mixture into an ungreased tube pan. I just poured/dumped the batter into my pan.

Bake for 35 minutes before checking for doneness with a wooden skewer. (When inserted halfway between the inner and outer wall, the skewer should come out dry). My cake looked pretty! :)

Cool upside down on cooling rack for at least an hour before removing from pan. I did do this as I did not want a potentially flat dense angel cake. And I must've made it right because the cake held together as it cooled down upside down. Hooray!

This Angel Food Cake was superb! Light and spongy and airy, but not eggy like a sponge cake. 

Side Note: After the cake set, the top part became sticky when touched. I wonder if it was because I didn't mix the sugar in all that well or if it had anything to do with me not sifting the dry ingredients. Hrmmmm.

In my personal opinion, the cake was just a tad too sweet so I found another recipe that I would like to try sometimes in the future from Joy of Baking. (Uses less sugar and more flour)

Homemade Custard

This is another one of hubby's creations where he likes to just "wing it." The custard is made with egg yolks, heavy whipping cream, sugar/splenda, a pinch of salt and vanilla extract. However, it takes a while to make for such a small serving... :( Welp, at least the hubby likes it and it comes out pretty darn good.

1 whole egg and 4 egg yolks, scrambled. Continuously stirred in a double boiler over medium to high heat. Add a pinch of salt. 

Continue to stir until slightly thickened as shown above.

Slowly stir in 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. Add in your sugar to desired sweetness. (We used about 2 tsp of splenda for a keto friendly version or 4 tsp of granulated white sugar). Add in 1 tsp vanilla extract. Stir, stir, stir until it's like super thick gravy.Then let it set in the fridge.

Comes out to be like pudding consistency, only it tastes like custard! :D Now we just need to figure out how to get rid of the lumps... maybe a hand blender or even a whisk? Btw, this is a 2 cup glass tupperware. And it took about a 1/2 hour of stirring to make this!!

Toffee Pretzel Chocolate Bark

This is so easy even a caveman can make it... assuming there's access to a working stove and oven. :D I like this recipe because you don't need a candy thermometer!!! I'm so glad to have stumbled onto this recipe. Poor hubby. He's on keto for all of February and has no idea he's missing out!

8 oz mini pretzels (enough to spread out onto a large baking sheet)
1 C butter
1 C brown sugar, packed
2 C semi sweet chocolate chips

I did a half batch and used regular pretzels. I just crushed them a bit before spreading out on a baking sheet lined with foil. I've read that parchment paper works fine too. You'll want to preheat your oven to 375°F first.

This was 6oz of crushed pretzels. (I used a lil more pretzels)

This was the 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup packed brown sugar. 

Bring it to a boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally to make sure everything is blending together nicely. Once you have a rolling boil going, keep the heat at medium and stop stirring. Let it bubble away for 3 minutes. (Mine turned out a lil darker compared to the original website.)

The butter/sugar mix was poured over the pretzels as best as possible... the gaps were somewhat closed when baked for 5 minutes in a preheated oven. (I probably should've measured out everything proportionally. i.e. 6 oz pretzels, 3/4 cup butter and 3/4 cup packed sugar...)

Sprinkle 1 cup of chocolate chips. Let the chips rest for a minute or two until the chips softens.

Spread the chocolate evenly over the pretzels with a spatula. Then, place it in the fridge for about a 1/2 hour so the chocolate can firm up.

Once everything hardened, I broke them up into handheld pieces. They truly are irresistible! Great for an appetizer, snack, munchies, dessert, you name it! Great sub for dinner... ;D 

Here in SoCal, I kept them stored in a ziploc baggie in the fridge so I don't have to worry about the chocolate melting. But then again, they don't last long!

Pear Crisp

Peel, core and slice up 4 pears. Since my pears were hard/crunchy when bitten into and still green, I also added a 1/4 cup of granulated sugar. Add 1-2 tsp of orange zest, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ground cloves, 1/4 tsp of ground nutmeg and some orange juice or water so that the pears don't brown on the bottom. Cover with lid and cook until the pears soften. Stir occasionally. Once the pears are soft and sweet to your liking, the sauce should be thickened with cornstarch. Should look like the below.

Pour your pear filling into a pie pan.

In a separate bowl, mix in 1/2 cup all purpose flour, 1/2 cup oatmeal, 1/2 cup granola, 1/4 cup brown sugar, and a 1/2 cup melted butter.

Spread evenly on top of the pear filling.

Bake in a preheated oven of 350°F for 20-30 minutes or until the top crisp is nicely browned. 

Dig in and enjoy! You could even top it off with whipped cream for a more decadent treat!! I'm happy to say that I received many compliments on this dish, especially since, there isn't a lot of pear desserts out there. It truly makes this one different and so awesome! :D

Pear-sauce

If you've ever had applesauce and really enjoyed it, you'll really like this homemade pear-sauce. It's super easy and all you need are pears and an orange! No sugar needed bc it's super sweet on its own!!

I used 10 ripe pears (from costco). If they are not ripe, they won't be sweet so it's totally worth it to wait until the pears are yellow-green. 

Peel, core and quarter the pears. Then place in a slow cooker.

Scrape an orange with a microplane for 2 tsp of orange zest and then juice the orange, pulp and all.

Add the 2 tsp orange zest and roughly 1/3 cup orange juice. Cook on high for 1 hour with cover to cook the pears. An hour later, break up the pears and stir so as not to burn the edge.

2 hours later, pear sauce should look like this. Cook for another 2 hours on high uncovered.

A total of 4 hours later, add in 2 tsp of pumpkin spice. Continue to cook.

An hour later, I used an immersion blender and blended the sauce. It's beginning to look a lot like applesauce. :)

Ta-da. It was mm-mmm yummy!!

And if you reduce it even further, you can get pear butter!!! I will do that next time for sure!!

Other pear butter recipes:

http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/easy-pear-butter-recipe/

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/pear-butter/