Serves 4
Equipment
- Whisk
Ingredients
| Conference Pears | 2 | |
| Sweet Apples | 2 | |
| Red Wine | 375 | millilitres |
| Vanilla Pod | 1 | |
| Ground Cinnamon | 2 | teaspoons |
| Star Anise | 1 | |
| Cloves | 6 | |
| Soft Brown Sugar | 1 | tablespoon |
| Double Cream | 150 | millilitres |
| Greek Yoghurt | 125 | grams |
| Soft Goats Cheese, at room temperature | 200 | grams |
| Icing Sugar (to taste) | 1 | dessert spoon |
| Juice from Pickled Cherries (optional) | 3 | dessert spoons |
| Chopped almonds | 30 | grams |
| Brown Sugar Honey Meringues | 4 | or plain meringues |
You need to make the meringues at least 24hrs ahead but they will keep up to a week. If making meringues doesn’t appeal or time doesn’t allow, just buy your favourites. I won’t tell anyone.
You’ll need to start this recipe by poaching the fruit as it needs to cool before assembly. Again, you could do this a couple of days ahead.
One thing to know about apples is the difference between sweet and tart apples when you cook them – a sweet apple will retain its shape while a tart apple will collapse (think apple sauce). For this recipe you want the poached apple slices to hold together to allow you to keep discernible bite sized pieces, so a sweet apple like a Jazz, Braeburn or Gala will work well.
You can use all apples or all pears as you prefer, or add/swap plums depending on what you have to use up.
Method
Meringues – see Recipe
Poached Fruit
- Place the red wine in a wide-based saucepan (so that the fruit can spread out in the pan).
- Peel, quarter and core the pears. Add to the red wine as you go to stop them going brown.
- Repeat with the apples.
- Slice the vanilla pod length ways then run the blunt side of a knife the length of the pod to scrape out the seeds. Put the seeds and the pod in the pan with the wine.
- Add the cinnamon, star anise and cloves to the pan.
- Bring to the boil and gentle simmer for around 15 minutes, until the fruit is softened but retains a little bite.
- Allow to cool completely in the liquid – this will help the spices infuse the fruit.
- Remove the fruit from the juice and slice into bite sized pieces. Retain the juice for now.
To assemble
- Lightly whip the double cream, until very soft peaks form.
- Beat the yoghurt to loosen then fold in the whipped cream.
- Cut the goat’s cheese into 1cm-ish cubes and fold into the mixture.
- Gently fold in the fruit.
- Break the meringues into small pieces and fold these in – they will continue to break a little as you fold so avoid breaking them into tiny pieces at the start if you want distinct crunchie bites.
- Now balance the flavour with icing sugar, a little juice from the poached fruit and juice from pickled cherries if you have it. Taste as you go until you get the blend of sweet and tart you prefer, taking care not to saturate things with too much juice.
- Serve sprinkled with chopped almonds and a sprig of mint if you want to look flash.
Keep any unused poaching juice for another day – either reduce down to use as a syrup with other desserts (fruit crumble, yoghurt, ice cream) or add to breakfast muesli or porridge.
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