Picture a Day - Day 279

Thank you all for your wonderful help in finding a pear recipe. If I was smart I would have followed one of the many that you all loved, found and shared with me.

Instead in a fit of wild abandon while leafing through my Better Homes & Garden cookbook I came across a pear cobbler recipe. How I love cobbler, let me count the ways (why do they call it cobbler anyway? I've never seen a recipe that calls for the addition of some nails, a piece of shoe leather or a leprechaun).

And we had everything in house according to the recipe, so I decided to just trust Mr. Better Home-es and Gardiens instead of all you wonderful readers.It started out okay. The filling was that nice simple take a bunch of fruit, add some sugar, add a little lemon juice and let all that boil then top off with a bit of corn starch for thickening.

The boil thickened fruit had that familiar slightly acidic and mostly sugar flavor where you can tell it's fruit but you're not really certain what kind. If I hadn't been the one to just cut up 6 pears you could have almost convinced me it was some of the more flavorless brands of apples.The issue was with the topping. Instead of a nice crumbly buttery sweet and crisp topping to compete with the fruit bottom the recipe created more of a dense bready blah mess:
I should have looked a bit closer at the recipe and realized that it called for way too much flour, not enough butter and the lack of sugar or any spice is always a red flag for me.

But alas, I was much too excited to finally be rid of the pears that were slowly fermenting in their bag (anyone want some pear vinegar? It's going really cheap and is perfect for those dishes you want to have that famous sour pear flavor) and jumped into a recipe without thinking it through.

I have learned my lesson and from now on when I ask from nice recipes from my fellow readers I will rely on their judgement and knowledge instead of trusting something that was written and probably proofed two times at best.

Have you ever found a recipe in a cookbook and had it turn out atrocious because of the way it was composed? What's your favorite baking cookbook?

P.S. Any tree painting fans stay tuned. I managed to hammer out nearly three new paintings this labor day weekend and I have an exciting few reveals later today.