Upside down pumpkin pear pie recipe

Do you ever wish you were back in middle school when life was easy and it kept you from eating too much and moving too little. I just can't figure out who I want to be and it's driving me mad. Do I want to be 'just' a mommy or do I want a career and if I go for the career how do I juggle my kid and my job in a way that I feel comfortable with. And about that job... what the heck do I want to do and how do I get it. I've been taught my whole life that I can be whatever I want to be if I work hard enough. Sure. I went to university, I traveled a lot as a "poor" student and had a ball. Then I got my degree (eventually) and have stood at a cross roads ever since. When the world is your oyster or whatever, there is just too much choice. It bums me out. So I spent a while watching old home videos which surely didn't make me feel better because my parents were barely 5 years older than I am now and they were already living in a different country for my dad's work. Plus the images remind me of why I actually don't really like living in the Netherlands and would give anything to get my entire family to move to a place where there are still more trees than people and the ground isn't so horribly flat. Could I move thousands of miles away and be happy? Is it worth taking the risk? Be it going or spending a lifetime wishing I lived somewhere else...

 If everyone could click on a banner on this page maybe I'll earn enough doing this not to have to pick and choose ;)

Anyway together with this dilemma I also cut off a flap of skin on the top of my index finger while putting a desk together which makes typing awkward (ever notice how weird that word is?) and completely ruined a batch of muffins because I once again (you would think I would only make this mistake once...) I added too much baking powder making those things taste like soap... yuk.

But you gotta love life for all the things you could do, one being Halloween! They don't really celebrate that here but it's a good reason to make pumpkin treats. I love pumpkin :) I just read it contains almost no vitamins so it's not a great veggie, but hey, it's not unhealthy...

I spend a minute deciding if I would make this pie with pears or apples. I chose pears because I had just bought a new type of pear with red colored flesh. It seemed very Halloweeny. When cutting it up I tried a piece and noticed they were quite tart and not soft at all as you would expect from a pear. If you can't find a pear like this I would suggest using apples instead as the acidity really offsets the sweetness of the rest of the pie.

Pumpkin pear pie

Ingredients:
- 2 tart pears (or 2 tart apples if you wish)
- 2 handfuls of sugar
- 1 can of pumpkin (425 grams) or buy a pumpkin, peel, scoop out the seeds and cook for 10 minutes after which you can puree it easily.
- 3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 100 grams oatmeal
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 2 handfuls of almonds, sliced

- Springform (where the sides come off)
- baking paper

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Peel, core and slice the pears thinly. Put baking paper over the bottom of the springform and then put the rim on. Grease the paper with crisco or some vegie oil. Sprinkle the sugar over it and lay the slices of pear in a nice circle on top. Set aside.

Divide the can of pumpkin over two bowls.
Add 1 egg, the condensed milk and the spices to bowl 1.
Add the other egg, the honey, oil and oatmeal to bowl 2.

Mix both bowls well.

Pour the contents of bowl 1 on top of the pear and use the back of a spoon to smooth it out.
Sprinkle the almonds over the top.

Now add bowl 2 in dollops over the top, and then spread that out carefully with the back of a spoon too. Try not to push it into the other layer.

Bake the pie for 45 minutes in the conventional oven (so no turning the air fan on, that will just dry the whole thing out). After 25 minutes turn the form so the side that faced the back now faced the front of the oven. That's just to get even heating. Test the pie by inserting a knife in the center, if it comes out clean it's done.

Leave the pie in it's form for 10 minutes. Then run a knife around the edge and take the rim off. Take a plate and lay it on top of the pie, use it to turn it over. Peel the baking paper off and tada, done!

I suggest leaving the pie covered in the fridge for a day before eating with some whipped cream. It will give the tastes time to settle and fully immerse themselves in the pie.

Enjoy!



Ps I promised a picture of my daughters winnie the pooh birthday cake but my hubby downloaded it to his computer and erased the card... I'm waiting for him to send the pictures to me.

Sophie the Giraffe cake

Our baby turned one this week! We gave her some books, car window stickers and winter accessories. She loved unpacking them and somehow understood that the wrapping was just that, wrapping. Not the gift. Maybe our wrapping paper wasn't pretty enough...
We are celebrating her birthday this weekend so I had no issues with making a birthday cake for another little girl who turned one at almost exactly the same time as our baby girl. I know her mommy from lamaze class and it wasn't until the follow up course that we found out she had been next door on the delivery ward! We had both come in for pain killers. After 16 hours I'd had enough.... so with a nice little pump on my arm which didn't help with the pain at all but did make me relax a little, my delivery finally went into hyper drive. So did the rest of my life, how this year has flown by!

Anyhoo, the order was for a Sophie the Giraffe puzzle cake. So once again I used my trusty method of finding a picture online and tracing it off my computer screen onto thick paper. I decided to make Sophie out of off-white fondant. I used cake tools and my fingers with the pic on my computer as reference to make her look a little 3D and then painted her brown spots on. It worked really well, better than I expected. I just have an issue with her eyes, which could have been better. They just don't say friendly/ happy to me, but black spots...

I also made a ribbon on the side of the cake with the same spots and a little bow for extra detail. The rest of the decoration is made out of marzipan and the inside is chocolate mud cake with a lemon butter cream, yummy!
I did notice that the number 1 is really unrecognizable on a cake. It might have been better to say 1 year old but that didn't fit anymore. Next time I'll have to find a more suitable 1.

Now I get to make my own baby's cake! I'm quite excited because it's going to be something really different. I don't want it to have too much decoration on it because I don't want her eating that so I've decided to leave it plain and add Winnie the Pooh and Piglet silhouette figures. Next week I'll show the result of that.

How to: Black and white Mickey Mouse/Disney cake pops

My mom ordered cake pops but gave me the choice of how they would look. Those are nice orders because I can try out ideas I have without spending too much money on it. Of course I did not charge her for the fact that they weren't all the same and much more work than your standard cake pop, so it's a good deal for both of us (in my opinion anyway). 

I wanted to make black and white Fab 4 cake pops (sorry to me that will never be the Beatles..) with a color accent. Unfortunately I didn't have green or blue fondant in the house so I kept those black and white. I actually like them this way too. I think Donald Duck is very recognizable, Goofy could use a green hat and maybe some ears though.

Mickey would probably have turned out better if his buttons had been red. Wouter didn't recognize him at all, even with Minnie right next to it... Minnie turned out great in my opinion. The heart shaped confetti worked great as a bow. 

I also made these pops with the intention of adding as little sugar as I possibly could. I therefore tried to stay away from buttercream and Candy melts, instead using a sugarfree cake recipe, ganache and chocolate.

It was a good try with fairly satisfactory results!

For those of you who are interested in a more thorough description of what I did, I added a how to here. Otherwise you can stop reading and maybe pin my picture for me :)

HOW TO:

(also check out the Mickey Mouse no-bake cake pop post)

The filling consists of Honey Ginger Cake. I found the recipe on Homemade Baby Food Recipes.com where they also have a lot of other great sugarfree cake recipes.

I had some white chocolate ganache which I had taken out of the freezer the day before. After I crumbled the cake to pieces, I used this to stick it back together. The cake is quite moist on its own and I found that I probably could have rolled satisfactory balls without adding the ganache. Anyhoo... I rolled the mixture into balls which were way too big and then coated them with a bit of wholewheat flour just so they wouldn't be so sticky. I put them into a egg tray with plastic wrap over it and used yellow Wilton Candy melt to stick a lolly pop stick into them. (I used Candy melt because you cannot temper that small amount of chocolate.) I put the tray into the freezer for at least 15 minutes so the pops would be hard and easy to work with (hmmm sounds weird, hard and easy... you get what I mean right?)

While the pops were in the freezer I made the Mouse ears. I used chocolate drops and an apple corer. This made a nice round piece of chocolate that wasn't too thin. I also tempered white chocolate (don't know how? Check here).

I coated all the pops in white chocolate first. A quarter of the pops I put on a piece of baking paper, those were going to be the Goofy's and half I added ears to. Because the pops came from the freezer the ears needed to go on quickly, because the chocolate sets really fast. It's good though because you don't risk the ears falling off before it's set.

I wanted to use the gold balls as in the picture above for Mickey buttons. I had it all set up but then completely forgot to stick them on after dipping. When I remembered the chocolate had long since set. It beats having to draw them on though, so I would definitely do this next time.

After all the pops were dipped in white chocolate I put them in a pop holder thing and put them back in the freezer. Meanwhile I tempered dark chocolate.

Mickey, Minnie and Donald have their top half in dark chocolate and Goofy the bottom, though because his stick is on top what you're doing is the same.

Minnie got two heart shaped confetti candies on top her head and I made the spots on here dress with a lollypop stick dipped in chocolate. That's also how I made the lines on Goofy, though I think I'll use a brush for that next time.

Mickey's buttons are made from yellow Wilton Candy Melt, but as I said before I'll use the gold balls next time.

Goofy's hat and Donald's hat and bow are made from white fondant.

Make it beautiful!