Gastronomic pleasures II: poires au vin rouge and birthday cake

Last week was one filled with celebrations: both my mum and dad had their birthdays plus my grandma and two other firends, so it was a bit crowded. So I decided to gift my parents something special, and thought I could make a birthday cake. Imagine, it was the first time!!! I'm more of a cook than a baker...so I was a bit nervous.

After I had done my research, I went to buy the ingredients for the cake, some of them being fruit. So that was when I stumbled upon pears. Mmmmm, the idea of poires au vin rouge came immediately to my mind and I knew I was in for some serious work. I got back home and this is what I did:

I started by peeling off the pears...be sure to pick a type of pears which is more consistent, more solid, as you have to cook them for a while and you don't want mashed pears at the end, but rather nice-looking, solid ones which melt in your mouth once you bite them.


Leave the possibility to grab them...the pears will look prettier and they will be easier to handle when you serve and eat them.

What I did next was to put them in wine with sugar and cinnamon and left them there to boil until they were tender and ready to eat.

Meanwhile, I started working on the cake. Soak the cake dough with some fruit syrup (choose mainly syrup of the fruit you will use in the cake) and then put a layer of cream, on which the first row of fruit will be.

I chose some vanilla-flavoured cream as it is rather neutral and gives a particular aroma to the composition.

Peaches were my first choice, these I took from a compote.

Meanwhile the pears were cooking beautifully and taking the colour of the wine. Take a look at this great picture!


Back to the cake! Second choice were oranges - they give a bit of freshness to the whole cake. These were fresh, not out of any can.

Pears were then ready....I don't know...I think after 20-30 minutes of medium fire cooking.. Here's one of the result:

Because it is still winter, as a top layer for the cake I chose apples. I cut them in small pieces and put them all in a pan with the sauce from the pears. Added some extra sugar and extra cinnamon and fried them until they were soft and the whole house smelled like winter delights.


Carefully I put the apples on top of the cake and put it in the fridge about an hour or more before serving.


Here's the end result. Hope you are hungry or you have some new inspiration for cooking for your loved ones. This huge cake dissapeared after two servings (3 people), altough it could have been enough for 10 as well.

Bon appetit!