Spiced Pear Bread {Recipe Revealed!!}

A humungous THANKS to Scottyboy & KatyGirl for asking Kaylee from Life Chasers to share her Nutmeg Spiced Pear Cake recipe. This blog was a couple of years old but it was exactly what I needed!!

Recently, I did some reorganization in my cabinets. I pulled all the oldest canned goods out to our wire shelving and put the newer items in the cabinets below. When I pulled out all the older cans I noticed I had six cans of sliced pears in juice. Uh, why? Why did I buy six cans? I like pears, but why do I have quite so many? I refuse to throw out good food and I knew I wanted to make them into a dessert, specifically a sweet bread for Kit and me.

After many, many Google, Pinterest and AllRecipes searches I stumbled on the above linked recipe and added my own tweaks. Below is my version of the recipe and I will make comments below the recipe why I chose to make those changes.

Spiced Pear Bread

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour

3 teaspoons ground nutmeg

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon  baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup pear juice reserved from drained cans

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cans (30 ounces) pear halves, reserve juice for  and mashed

1 cup chopped almonds

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the first six ingredients.

In another bowl, whisk the sugar, oil, eggs, cider, and vanilla.

Add to the dry ingredients and stir well.

Stir in pears and pecans.

Pour into a greased and floured 10-in fluted bunt pan.

Bake at 350F for 65-70 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean.

Cool before removing from pan to a wire rack.My changes from the original linked recipe:

• Doubled the amount of nutmeg and cinnamon
• Reduced the amount of salt
• Used juice from canned pears instead of apple cider
• Still had some juice wasted–perhaps make the sauce linked in the recipe with the pear juice
• Increased amount of pears to 30 oz from 29 oz. Simply because I have 15 oz cans instead of the family size cans.
• I topped my pear bread with nuts instead of mixing them in, but I like the idea of nuts throughout the bread
• I got to use my new silicone bunt pan…so strange, but it worked!
• I had a small bunt pan, so I actually made a bunt and a small loaf

This was an awesome recipe
and you can bet your bunts I will be making it again!

~Kat~

Pear Pie–Needs Some Adjustments

Can you see the hidden shapes on top of the crust? I attempted to cut the vent holes with the same shape, but they stretched and lost their awesome.

I used the fantastic apple pie recipe I found online and it is almost perfect. But instead of apples I used pears from our farm. I forgot that I decreased the temperature of the oven the first time I used this recipe. So…my crust was well done and my fruit was still a little hard.

We’ll see what my coworkers think.of it today. I’m nervous and not entirely thrilled that I made such a silly irrevocable mistake.

Update
My coworkers made it disappear easily during my eight hour work shift. Everyone agreed the crust and flavor was great.

They made some legit recommendations about a future fix. First, being if I have particularly hard fruits, I could cook them down in a sauce pan with the sugar to help soften them up.
Second, they also agreed that 375°F was high for pie and I should lower the temp.
I also hope to cut up my pear chunks into more even sizes. I think the larger pieces were the undercooked ones.