winter fruit salad

I really wanted to love this recipe. Its beautiful, it uses seasonally appropriate fruit (pears, apples, and dried fruit), and interesting. It produced a heavenly aroma, and gave my refrigerator an exotic aroma that I found irresistible. Unfortunately, I found its strong flavor to be overwhelming.

The first step in preparing this recipe is to heat water, sugar, star anise, and vanilla bean. I used the suggested 3 star anise, but I think I would have liked it better had I only used 1 or 2. The recipe also instructs you to incubate the fruit overnight. I think instead you could make the syrup in the morning, and marinate your fruit for only an hour or two.

The sprinkling of pomegranate on top made this really beautiful.