Roasted pear recipe from marthastewart.com
Cheesecake recipe from epicurious.com
Notes: For me, a cheesecake needs to have one, maybe two, distinct flavour components. For example, lemon or chocolate-hazelnut. Too many flavours are hard to balance, and plain is too boring to enjoy forkful after forkful. This pear and maple cheesecake was a wonderful combination. It has syrup in both the crust and filling and is brushed onto the pears before they are roasted. We usually buy an Amber grade of syrup for all kinds of uses, whether on pancakes or in baking. Its stronger maple flavour was appropriate for this cheesecake.
The Martha Stewart recipe is an unbaked cheesecake which reviewers noted was very runny, so I just used their idea for the pears. After roasting them in the even, the fruit slices didn't take on a lot of colour, so I used a torch to caramelize them further. I learned you have to be very careful on parchment as it is highly flammable! The finished cheesecake was quite sweet, so I would use a touch less syrup in the batter next time, and maybe just a standard graham crust as well.
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