Pears Belle Helene

Our answer

Nigella's recipe for Pears Belle Helene (from HOW TO EAT) poaches pears in a vanilla flavoured syrup. When poaching fruit you can add flavourings to the cooking liquid as the flavour will infuse into the fruit. The vanilla poaching syrup can also be used a second time to poach another set of pears.

You can substitute drained, canned pears for the poached pears and the recipe specifies pears canned with fruit juice. Unfortunately we don't believe that adding some vanilla extract to the juice will really affect the flavour of the canned pears as there isn't enough time for the pears to absorb the flavour while the sauce is being made. However you could add some vanilla extract to the chocolate sauce instead, if you want to add an underlying note of vanilla. The sauce already has coffee in it, to help enhance the flavour of the chocolate, but you could add a teaspoon of vanilla extract when you add the cream to the pan. Use natural vanilla extract and not vanilla essence. Vanilla essence is often a synthetic flavouring and doesn't have the complexity or depth of flavour of vanilla extract.