Pearfection or Brown Butter, why are you so delicious?

This Winter, Juni fell in love with pears, which is odd given her clear preference for face-squishingly sour fruits, such as pomegranate and kiwi and pineapple. Therefore, our fruit bowl has been well stocked with Bosc pears for the past several months. I also love pears. Fresh pears are so juicy and sugary and pleasantly gritty. And they have the most fetching shape of all the fruits. But I have never met a pear in a dessert that I liked. They always seem to melt away into the other flavors, losing any identifiable pear-ness. A few months back, I baked a particularly disappointing Pear Butterscotch Pie from Gourmet Magazine (RIP). Not that it didn't taste good. It was pie. It tasted good. But it did not taste at all like pear OR butterscotch. It tasted like pie spices. It could have very well been an apple pie made with mediocre, out-of-season apples. So pears seem to always fail me in baking. Their flavor and texture are too delicate. They require a light touch. Or, as it turns out, brown butter.

Though I had long given up hope of a pear-themed dessert, I couldn't resist when I saw Deb's post about a Bittersweet Chocolate and Pear Cake. Because bittersweet chocolate and pear sounds like a killer combination. It reminds me of some dried pears dipped in chocolate that I had once somewhere. Boston, maybe. Anyway, the chocolate isn't what sold me. She had me at browned butter - that heavenly elixir that exists just before the butter scorches and sets off the smoke alarm (not that that has ever happened in my kitchen, ahem). I only recently learned that I haven't been browning my butter quite enough. I was being too cautious. I happened to be sitting in a restaurant where I had a clear view of the cook who was solely in charge of making the brown butter sauce for the ravioli that I had ordered. I watched him make it over and over again and each time I cringed, thinking, oh no! That butter is burned. He has left it too long! But no, it turns out it was perfect and I was a butter browning coward. Not any more though. For this cake, my butter was sufficiently and terrifyingly browned. 

And the result? This cake is dynamite. It is moist and flavorful, with wonderful bits of chocolate and pear. The pear actually tastes like pear and yes, the pairing of the pear with the chocolate is perfect. But it is the browned butter in the batter that will blow your mind. Alliterations aside, make this cake and enjoy. And don't be afraid to brown your butter.