Pear Bread

What do you when life gives you a bunch of overly ripe pears? You make pear bread of course! Every year my dad gets a basket of pears from work. I'm normally one of the only ones who end up eating them. By the time I got home from school last Thursday they were already pretty ripe. I know I like food and all but eating 7 pears in a few days is impossible. In order to save the pears from an untimely death (in the garbage) I decided to make this pear bread. I suffered some set backs in the making of this bread, but I fortunately I still prevailed. Have you ever been half way through a recipe and realized that you're missing a main ingredient--like say an egg? Oh that happened. I had already put most of my ingredients in their respective bowls when I realized we only had 2 eggs and I needed 3. A normal person might say, "Oh time for a quick trip to the store to get some eggs!" But not me. I'm playing the role of lazy college student on winter break this week. I did some Googling and found an adequate substitute for an egg: 1 1/2 tbsp oil, 1 1/2 tbsp water, and 1 tsp baking powder. Surprisingly, it actually worked. I probably wouldn't use it as a substitute for all of the eggs in a recipe but when you're only missing one it seems to do the job. Another thing that I had problems with is that the original recipe said to shred the pears. My pears were far too ripe to do that so I just diced them as small as I possibly could. I actually liked it this way because it added a little texture. So if your pears are firm but ripe you can try shredding two cups, but if your pears are overly ripe like mine I would suggest peeling the pear and then just cutting it up as small as possible. As for the topping, I just dusted a little powdered sugar over the bread when I was done but I think some kind of cream cheese or caramel icing would be really good too!

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Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups sugar
2 to 4 firm, ripe pears, shredded (I did 2 overly ripe pears diced to get about 2 cups)
2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and prepare a bundt ban. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In a medium bowl, mix together vegetable oil, eggs, sugar, and vanilla extract. Peel and core pear and then shred them (or dice finely). You will need 2 cups of the pears. Add the pears to the wet mixture. Mix until well combined. Pour the pear/wet mixture into the flour mixture. Stir until there are no more streaks of flour in the batter. Pour batter into the bundt pan. Bake for 50 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes and then carefully flip the bundt pan over to release the bread. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Source: Recipe from Food Librarian