I did intend to write about the delicious turkey, the gloriously claret-red cranberry sauce, and the mountain of gloriously crunchy roast potatoes–the latter made by Dave–but it wasn’t until we were all licking the plates clean that I remembered about taking a photo or two. So, please just pretend that I told you all about it, and let’s talk dessert!

As with the starter, I wanted to make the dessert in advance to minimise stress levels on the day. Much as I love Christmas pudding, I never eat it on Christmas Day (or indeed, Boxing Day in this case) these days as it’s just too heavy after a rich meal. I was looking for something that I could just slice and serve, light in texture, and of course… it had to be beautiful, too.

After much flicking through cookbooks I chose the Ethereal Pear Charlotte from Rose Levy Berenbaum’s weighty tome, The Cake Bible. If you’ve ever picked up a copy of The Cake Bible, then you’ll know that the recipes are both precise and long. However, it is only when you read more closely that you realise each recipe typically requires three component recipes, and so your workload just tripled in one fell swoop!

The pear charlotte was no exception and turned into a real Labour of Hercules. The charlotte consists of a smooth and light Bavarian cream encased in fluffy sponge cake and is topped with vanilla-scented poached pears. Yum! Sounds simple, huh?

I started a couple of weeks ago with the improvisation of some Poir Williams liqueur and the lining of the springform tin. Call me stingy, but I refuse to pay upwards of £15 (plus delivery!) for a tiny bottle of liqueur when I will be using the grand total of 6 tablespoons of it. So, I bought a couple of small pears, peeled and cored them, and shoved them into a jar along with sugar and brandy. They got a good shake every time I opened the fridge and gradually the rawness of the brandy dissipated as the flavours mingled. I have no idea how this home-made product compares to the real thing, but for my purposes it works very nicely. It’s sweet, alcoholic and tastes intensely of pears.

I got slightly obsessive-compulsive about finding the right size of swiss/jelly roll tin for making the biscuit roulade to line the springform tin. As with many, many things… swiss rolls are considerably larger in America, and thus it’s incredibly hard to track down the specified 12″ by 17″ tin in the UK. I did eventually manage to track down a tin which was close enough to the required dimensions and I’m glad I did otherwise it would have made lining the tin quite difficult. As it was, I only just managed to line the tin. RLB’s recipes are very precise!

The cool zebra-stripe effect is very easy to achieve. When you’ve made your first batch of biscuit, you snip it into four equal oblongs using kitchen scissors, generously brush three of them with sieved raspberry conserve–I did not make my own, I’m not completely insane, and I’m also rather fond of Bonne Maman’s conserves–and stack them neatly on top of each other. Naturally you finish with the plain piece of roulade on top. To make this structure easier to handle, it goes into the freezer until firm. (This is one of Rose’s few vagueities. I can only tell you that mine sliced just fine after being in the freezer for 6+ hours, so you needn’t worry overly if you forget about it.)

So, you have your frozen cake, now you need to slice it up into 4mm slices and then… flip each slice round by 90 degrees and Hey Presto! Zebra stripes! Further conserve is used to stick the blank edges of the cake slices together.

Once it was all stuck together nicely, I lowered into place a disc of roulade for the base of the charlotte and wrapped the heck out of it with clingfilm. I froze it with a board underneath for extra support as it still felt a bt wobbly, then whipped that away later on.

A few days before Christmas I very industriously made a jar of apple jelly for the gelatine-set glaze on top of the charlotte. I should note that RLB doesn’t instruct you to make your own jelly, but I just couldn’t get hold of either crab apple jelly or normal apple jelly, despite having seen crab apple jelly in my local supermarket a couple of months ago. However, having made apple jelly a few years ago I knew it was easy–if not quick–so I boiled up some chopped apples in the microwave and drained them through muslin overnight. A stovetop recipe can be found here.

On Christmas Eve I recommenced Project Pud, following my last-minute visit to the supermarket at 7am. (Alas, the rest of Bristol had the same idea and were also shopping at the break of dawn, so it was really quite exhausting.) Anyway!

Step one (of many) was poaching the pears. I’d been ripening up some Abate Fetel pears–Italy’s favourite pears, apparently!–over the week and thankfully they ripened just in time. These pears are very aromatic, juicy and have almost icy-white flesh. They’re also very yummy stirred into porridge for breakfast, which is what Lucas and I did with the left-over half that wouldn’t fit into the saucepan.

Then there was a Long Wait while the pears cooled and infused further. As I was feeling paranoid about the pears picking up unwanted flavours I was a bit stuck for things to do. I couldn’t make the terrine as that would fill the house with delicious pork fumes and I didn’t want to shove the pears in the fridge as there was a deliciously stinky brie/gorgonzola hybrid lurking in there that I had planned to have at lunch.

Once the pears had cooled, I fished them out and reduced the poaching liquid slightly to intensify the flavour and then started making the custard. The interesting thing about this charlotte is that the Bavarian cream filling doesn’t contain any milk which makes it light and refreshing.

A small aside–is making custard supposed to be a Herculean task? I’ve never considered it to be remotely challenging, but after watching Rosemary Schraeger’s School for Cooks on ITV–any other Brits see it?–I’ve begun to wonder if I should be quaking in my boots every time I make it. It was inevitable… if custard was on the menu, at least one of the (supposedly) good cooks would scramble it. Not once, but twice. I know that pressure does dreadful things to your cooking confidence, but I began to wonder if the production team were sabotaging them for extra drama!

So, the custard. I bloomed the gelatine in a little of the hot pear poaching liquid and while that soaked, I whisked the yolks, sugar and remaining poaching liquid together. The best utensil I’ve found for cooking custard is a silicone spatula. The flat bottom and slightly curved edge allows you to scrape right into the sides of the pan.

The mixture had to be stirred over a very low heat until the gelatine–which rather worryingly popped out of the ramekin in one big hockey puck shaped lump–melted, and then I whacked the heat up to medium-high and stirred aggressively until the custard was thick enough. If I’d bothered doing the finger test then it would have coated the back of a spoon, but I didn’t fancy scalding my finger. (You should really stand there and stir over a low heat for ages, but I’m quite impatient. If you lift the pan off the heat every so often and have a good scrape at the bottom, then you’ll be absolutely fine. If it does start to scramble then don’t scrape and pass it through a sieve immediately.)

Next up was the italian meringue and using a sugar thermometer for the first time. This didn’t go well. My smallest saucepan was too shallow to clip the thermometer onto the side and the next smallest was too wide, so I ended up dangling the thermometer into the pan every so often, and of course… I over-cooked the syrup. I think I managed to get about a third of it into the egg whites before it set into a solid lump.

To rescue this, I had two options. Start again, which was easy enough since there were plenty of eggwhites left over, or improvise a little. I wound up fishing out lumps of sugar then heating the bowl of whipped egg whites over a pan of water–with some extra sugar optimistically thrown in–until warm, then I replaced the bowl on the KitchenAid and whipped until cook. I guess it was a hybrid between Italian and Swiss meringue.

At this point I pulled the lined springform from the freezer and chanting, “Almost there, almost there…” under my breath, whipped the cream and whisked the custard in an ice-bath. When the custard was just starting to set, I whisked in some more of my pear liqueur and folded the meringue followed by the whipped cream–which had mysteriously thickened further as I cooled the custard–into the mixture. As the cream had gone crazy, I had to be a bit more forceful in my folding (read: beat like mad) so I lost a little air, I’m sure.

You can imagine the huge sigh of relief once the bavarian was safely poured into the tin, can’t you?

The surprising thing is that I got all of that done in a morning. The pears were poached as soon as I got back from the supermarket and before Lucas got up, and the bavarian cream while he napped llater on in the morning. Playing trains for a few hours, interspersed with the novelty value of doing some walking, works really well for tiring babies out.

And after all of that, how did it taste? In one word: amazing. It was totally worth all the extra effort.

The pears on top were juicy and delicately fragrant with vanilla, and meltingly tender from poaching. A spoon slid smoothly through the fruit and then into soft, smooth pear cream. The combination was incredibly light and refreshing, at complete odds with its decadent looks. The only disappointment–for me–was the sponge lining of the charlotte. The texture was nice, but it really lacked flavour. However, everyone else thought it was fine, so it’s probably just me being overly critical.

I can see myself making this again, although I would probably just use a regular swiss roll recipe to line the charlotte, perhaps using vanilla sugar too, and I definitely wouldn’t bother making Italian meringue. I am convinced that a Swiss meringue would do the job perfectly well and it avoids all that messing around with sugar thermometers.

Poached Pears

2 large, ripe but firm pears
375ml water
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons Poire William liqueur
50g sugar
1 inch vanilla bean, split lengthwise

Peel, halve and core the pears just before poaching so that they do not darken. (A melon baller makes coring the pears very quick.)

In a saucepan big enough to hold the pear halves in one layer, combine the water, sugar, lemon juice, liqueur and vanilla bean, and stir to dissolve the sugar.

Add the pears and bring to the boil. Cover tightly and simmer for 8-10 minutes or until a thin skewer inserted in the thickest part of a pear goes in easily. Remove from heat and cool, covered. Refrigerate the pears in their liquid until ready to use.

When ready to use for the charlotte, drain the pears, reserving the liquid. Remove the vanilla bean and scrape the seeds into the liquid. Reduce the liquid to 1 1/2 cups and use for preparing the Pear Bavarian Cream.

Use a sharp knife to slice the pears lengthwise for the top of the charlotte.

Pear Bavarian Cream

50g sugar
pinch of salt
9g (or 1 tablespoon) powdered gelatine
5 large egg yolks
pear poaching liquid (1 1/2 cups)
250ml double cream

–Italian meringue
66g sugar
2 tsblespoons water
2 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 tablespoons Poire William liqueur

Sprinkle the gelatine over 4 teaspoons pear poaching liquid in a small bowl. Stir to moisten and leave to bloom for 5 minutes. Set a fine sieve over a medium bowl beside the cooker.

In a small saucepan beat together the egg yolks, sugar and salt. If the rest of the poaching liquid isn’t hot, then heat to just below boiling point–a couple of mins in the microwave should do the trick. Beat liquid into the yolk mixture carefully–add roughly a tablespoon at a time, and once a third of the liquid is in you can just pour the rest straight in.

Scrape the gelatine mixture into the yolk mixture and set the pan over a low heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until no trace of gelatine remains. Increase the heat and cook, still stirring, until the custard thickens. Immediately pour through the sieve and leave to cool.

Whisk the cream until thickened but only just holding its shape when spooned up. You do not want stiff peaks. Cover with clingfilm and reserve in the fridge.

In a small saucepan combine the sugar and water for the Italian meringue. Stir until dissolved and then bring to the boil. Once boiling, turn out the heat and beat the egg whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and continue beating on high until stiff peaks form.

Turn the heat back on under the saucepan and bring the syrup to 250F or hard-boil stage. Use your sugar thermometer.

Pour some of the syrup over the egg whites, then turn the mixer back on and whisk on high for a minute. Turn off, add some more syrup and repeat until all syrup incorporated.

Whisk on medium until the bowl of the mixer is cool.

Cool the custard over an ice-bath, whisking, until just beginning to set round the outside of the bowl and you can see whisk marks on the surface. Whisk in the liqueur and then fold in, using the whisk, the italian meringue and whipped cream. Pour into the lined tin or whatever you’re using to serve it.