100-Mile Desserts: Pear Upside Down Cake with Raw Whipped Cream

We been ordering late summer pears from Niagara through our buying club, and they have been sitting in bowls on the table looking gorgeous as they slowly ripened this past week. The plan was to make them into pear sauce for winter months, although we've also been enjoying fresh pears each day and the pile is dwindling. From my recent posts here it looks like I'm doing a lot of baking and not much else! We've had a number of guests in our B&B this past week and so I've had the chance to serve a variety of fresh baking to them, while also getting to photograph and blog about it :) I made a fresh pear upside down cake for our 100-mile dessert this week. The cake is usually a gingerbread variety, but I made it with local honey and maple syrup instead and it took on a darker almost pumpkin pie flavour. A friend dropped off a full 500 ml of fresh raw cream! This prompted me to bake this cake, so I could serve it with large dollops of this amazing fresh raw cream ontop (made into whipping cream, sweetened with local honey). Wow! Decadent! This recipe is a keeper - and it looks beautiful with slices of pears pressed into the dough once the cake is inverted. Here's the recipe (based on a similar one posted here about a year ago). This recipe is adapted from Simply in Season.

PEAR UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE

Syrup:

1/4 cup honey and/or maple syrup

1 Tbsp. butter

1 Tbsp. water

2-3 ripe pears, cored and sliced

Cake Batter:

1/3 cup butter

1 egg

1 1/2 cups local flour (spelt)

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup honey

1/2 cup milk or buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

2. Prepare syrup by melting first four ingredients together in small saucepan. Stir until well combined. Pour into 8x12 glass baking dish.

3. Arrange sliced pears evenly on top of the syrup.

4. In medium sized mixing bowl, beat butter, sweetener and egg.

5. Mix all dry ingredients together in small bowl.

6. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture alternately with milk.

7. Spoon cake batter over pears in baking dish.

8. Bake about 30 to 35 minutes or until knife inserted in cake comes out clean. Remove from oven, cool a few minutes and turn onto a platter.

9. Serve warm or cold with homemade yogurt or whipped cream (with raw milk if you can get it!).

Makes eight servings.