Caramelized Pear Upside-Down Gingerbread

Welcome to the beginning of my blog! I love baking and decorating cakes. At present I have begun a culinary program in Illinois. This is nothing more than a fun blog to share ideas and projects with other baking and culinary enthusiasts.

I have been baking and decorating cakes for about ten years. Sometimes for money, other times just for fun. It is a very satisfying, tiring, and challenging occupation. Sometimes I love it, other times it can be a real burn-out. But, I always come back to it because deep-down I love creating. So, now you know a little about me, I will start cataloging some of the recipes I've tried - and what I thought about them.

I have many, many, many (did I mention many) baking books. This particular recipe (caramelized pear) comes from my Williams-Sonoma cake book. Now let me just say, I love pears and I like gingerbread - they don't necessarily need to go together. I really hated this cake. The combination of pear and gingerbread were not delightful to the senses.

Here are my pears cut all nice and pretty. Pears are really good, by themselves.

Here I am caramelizing the sugar. Once caramelized the pears are placed face down in a cake pan and the caramelized sugar is poured over. I do believe I burnt the sugar because it was very dark once the process was complete.

The pears are in the pan overlayed four deep and I poured my caramelized sugar over them.

Now the gingerbread batter. (So far so good)

And.....

It didn't look too bad but the smell permeated the whole kitchen. It is under the "autumn and winter cake" section of the book. Needless to say, this bad boy had a date with the trash can.