Have Yourself a Little Gingerbread Pear Upside Down Cake

This is one of the most delicious and moist christmas cakes I have ever made. It´s a gingerbread pear upside down cake which I came up with last night, cause I just felt like baking a cake again. The last couple of weeks I´ve been baking lots of christmas cookies, and now 4 days before christmas I wondered, what kind of dessert one could make for christmas eve dinner. Voila this is my first suggestion and tomorrow there will be another recipe up on the blog. For those who think cooking for christmas eve is enough work, I can promise, you can make this cake a day ahead and it will taste as fresh, as if it had just come out of the oven!

This is what you will need

5 pears, cored and quartered
1 cup butter+ 2tbs. butter
2 tbs fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup of sugar
2 tbs rum
2 cups flour
5 tsp gingerbread spice (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg)
a pinch of salt
6 eggs
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 tsp. baking soda
4 tbs. boiling water

Pre-heat oven to 200°C. Combine quartered pears with lemon juice. Melt sugar and 2 tbs of butter in a skillet and toss pears in it, each side for a minute. Add rum and let simmer for a couple of minutes, until mixture as thickened to a syrup. Butter your cake tin and lay pears on the bottom of your cake tin. Combine 4 tbs. of boiling water with the syrup and set aside for your dough later on, to make it super moist.

Now prepare the dough: Whisk together flour, salt, baking soda and gingerbread spice in a medium sized bowl. With an electric mixer mix butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and mix creamy. Last but not least add flour mixture, honey and 4tbs of your remaining syrup. Pour batter on top of your pears and bake in oven for about 50-60 minutes (oven temperature:180°C). Don´t worry, this sounds like a long time, but this cake definitely needs this time to bake and still tastes amazingly moist, even the day after! Let cool out on a wrack, then invert cake onto a serving plate. And dust with powdered sugar.