Baked Pears

Baked pears are a great warm dessert that's perfect for wintertime. Baked pears are amazing because they're super easy to make, are deliciously sweet, and go great with a big scoop of ice cream!

Anjou pears are a winter fruit and perfect for this recipe, but any pear you can find will work as long as they are ripe.

This simple recipe needs:

• pears
• butter
• brown sugar
• natural apple cider or natural apple juice (the unfiltered kind)
• honey (optional)
• cinnamon (optional)

Portions for these ingredients are flexible, so you can use more or less depending on your taste. You really can't make a mistake with this recipe.

Before we start anything, preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C). If you have oven racks move them to have a rack in the middle of the oven.

With the oven warming up we can move to mixing up the ingredients.

We'll be cooking our pears in a sweet mixture of apple cider, sugar, and butter.

In a high walled baking dish, add a a 1/3 cup of brown sugar, then add 2/3 cup of apple cider and mix until sugar is mostly dissolved. If you want to kick it up a notch you can dip a fork in honey and add that to the sugary sauce, but that's optional.

To give the sauce some body a nob of room temperature butter was whisked into the mix until it was of uniform consistency. That's it, your sauce is done! You can refine the ingredient portions to make the sauce your own. If you have any good additions please share them in the comments below!

With the oven heating and sauce ready we can prepare the pears.

Cut each pear down the middle and then carve out the core. As long as your pears are ripe, this should be easy.

Dunk the pear halves into the sauce, then rest the pears in the baking dish with the cut side facing upwards. Using a large spoon or turkey baster, ladle the sauce mixture into the core cavity.

By now your oven should be at temperature. Carefully open the oven and place the baking dish on the middle rack.

Bake for 10 minutes.

Using an oven mitt remove the pears from the oven and place them on a safe surface. Your pears should be turning golden brown and smell amazing.

Baste them in the sauce, rotate them, flip them over, do what you must to make sure they're covered in sauce and not burning, and then put them back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

Your pears should be soft all the way through, an easy way to find out is by sticking them with a toothpick.

I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for good vanilla ice cream. To me, ice cream and fruit is one of the best dessert combinations around.

With the pears out of the oven and ready to plate, I scoop out a generous portion of ice cream to go with the hot pears.

With the ice cream and pears plated, take a spoonful of the sauce the pears were cooked in and drizzle it over the plate, it really makes the presentation pop!

Your guests won't believe their taste buds when you serve up this dessert. Soft, with a nice mix of hot and cold, and of course sweet.

Though I usually make baked pears in the winter, they really are a great dessert any time of the year!

Did you make your own baked pears? I want to see it!

Happy making :)