Colorful Pear Slices

Decorative Pear Slices are quite simple to make. You need a sharp knife or slicer, where you can remove thin slices, water sugar and natural fruits to give color. A good slicer will make your slices perfect and waste less fruit.

Especially if you decorate a large cake, you need a lot of fruits. The cake you see in the photo is about 30 pear slices on a small cake about 15 cm in diameter.

What are the tricks of making decorative fruit?

  • You can also use apples instead of pears.
  • Do not peel the fruit you use to prevent it from spreading.
  • Choose the hard type of fruit you use. You can even opt for less cured fruits.
  • Slice the fruits as thin as possible. If you chop thick, it will dry longer and curl as it hardens.
  • The higher the color intensity you use, the further the pears will go away from transparency. You may not use food coloring if you wish.
  • If you wish you can color the water using 1 – 2 drops of beet juice or dark fruits (strawberries, blackberries, black mulberry) .
  • If you want, after drying, you can additionally emphasize the color of the patches with powder dyes, golden powder etc.
  • Stick the patches to a track covered with cream or ganache. Pears for decorating the cakes are stored in an airtight container, put baking paper between the layers of slices.

Ingredients

2 parts of water
1 part sugar
Food dye in gel or natural dyes (eg beets, raspberries, blue Chinese peas – peas I stained blue and purple slices)
Pears / apples

Steps

  • Water with sugar bring to boiling, add the dye. The more dye, the more intense the color and the smaller the effect of transparency.
  • Pears cut into thin slices 1-1.5 mm. We use firm varieties, we choose less-ripened fruits with a proportional shape. It's best to use a good quality mandolin, but you can handle a sharp knife. The thicker the slices, I would curl more when drying
  • Slice the pears into the boiling syrup, reduce the power of the burner to medium and cook for about 10-15 minutes, until the slices become slightly transparent. Then turn off the cooker and leave the pears in syrup for 1-2 h (you can even for the whole night).
  • Pry the dried fruits with a paper towel, put on a tin lined with a teflon or silicone mat. The baking paper is also OK, but I have noticed that the pears are more adhering to it.
  • Pear for cake decoration, dry for about 2 hours in the oven at 75 C, or in a fruit dryer (in the dryer a little longer). Pears should be still flexible, do not overdo it with drying, we do not mean to get chips. The pears hardens additionally after being removed from the oven. The length of drying depends on from the thickness of the patches, so check every 30 minutes. are the pears okay?

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