We have two pear trees in the back garden. This time of year we come into a glut of pears, so there will likely be a few pear recipes coming up. Please let me know if the comments if you have any pear recipe recommendations for us to try. Today, we had some Greek yogurt in the fridge, so we tried this Poached Pear Vanilla Yogurt Cake from Pardon Your French. Check it out for more yummy French recipes.
Ingredients:
Poached pears:
2 pears (maybe 3 – in case one gets eaten)
1 cup sugar
3 cups water
juice of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
Yogurt cake:
125g butter, softened
½ cup Greek yogurt
1 ½ cups sugar
3 free range eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
3 cups self-raising flour
Icing sugar for decoration
Instructions:
Poached pears:
Combine the sugar, water, lemon juice and vanilla essence in a large pot. Bring mixture to a simmer. Peel and cut the pears in quarters, removing cores. Poach pears in the syrup for about 10 minutes. Remove pears and set aside to cool.
Yogurt cake:
Preheat oven to 180°C (356°F).
In a food processor beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the yogurt, free range eggs and vanilla essence. Sift the flour into a large bowl, make a well in the middle and fold in the wet ingredients.
Pour the batter into a greased cake tin and spread it out. Cut the pears in slices leaving one then attached at one end. Fan out the pears and place them decoratively on top of the cake.
Bake for about one hour at 180°C (356°F) until a skewer comes out of the centre clean.
Allow to cool before dusting with icing sugar.
What the kids can do:
Hand washing: Don’t forget to get the kids to wash their hands before you start. Little hands always seem to end up touching everything, including the ingredients.
Eggs: Pro tip for breaking eggs with a 4 year old, break eggs into a separate glass bowl before adding to your other ingredients. That way you can see and pick out any bits of shell before they are added in by mistake. I like to use free range eggs, because it is kinder to the chickens, and they also taste better. Bear in mind that raw eggs can carry Salmonella so wash little hands if they end up the raw egg. I also don’t recommend eating raw cake batter, just in case.
Mixing the ingredients: My daughter (age 4) added all the ingredients for the poaching to a pot. Once it was time to heat it up, I took over, reminding her the pot would be hot. Miss four had a go at pealing the pears (being careful of fingers!), then I finished the pealing and cut and cored the pears. We had to do an extra pear, as one got eaten along the way. Then we poached the pears for ten minutes while we made the cake batter with Miss four adding the ingredients to the food processor. Bear in mind that little hands can fit down the shoot of the food processor, so always supervise this step.
The biggest messes seen to happen when sifting and mixing dry ingredients with the kids. There is not really any way around this, so just be ready to clean up afterwards. When fold wet into dry ingredients, you want to mix thoroughly, but not too much or the cakes will go flat, this usually requires the grown up to either finish off the mixing and/or intervene before things are mixed too much. Kids can help put the cake mixture into the greased cake tin.
Having cooled the poached pears, I cut them to fan the out, then my daughter helped arrange them on top of the cake. Once baked, kids can help with the sprinkling of icing sugar. In this case though, Miss four was onto other things by the time the cake was done, so I finished it off alone.
This cake keeps a few days at room temperature. A slice can be added to lunch boxes and you don’t have to feel so bad about giving them cake, because it comes with built in fruit.
Keeping Them Occupied 