The White Ramekins

food & photography

Pear Baked Oatmeal

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Pear Baked Oatmeal

I love going to brunches and more than brunches, I love having breakfast with similar if not bigger spread. Especially because I am an early morning riser, irrespective of a weekday or a weekend. Getting up early in the morning and having a heavy breakfast after a refreshing morning walk, is something which keeps me energized throughout the day.

Pear Baked Oatmeal

My weekends are more refreshing than my weekdays {i know, it’s with most of us}, and demand a lot more of my energies put into trying out new recipes in my kitchen and photo shooting them. And whatever time remains out of that, I spend that with my family and friends.

Pear Baked Oatmeal

Breakfast on a busy weekday would normally be fruits, granola and milk…a super quick one. No time to sit back, relax and enjoy anything better. But on weekends, I try to have something expansive, and wouldn’t even mind turning on my oven. I would sometime bake wholemeal muffins or make pancakes. And if I am in mood of having something tangy or spicy, I would turn to some Indian breakfast recipes like Poha (made of beaten rice), or Idli Sambhar (steamed rice cakes with lentil and onion soup)

Pear Baked Oatmeal

Visiting my parents on weekend calls for a different genre of breakfast recipes altogether, which would include normally, Aloo Pyaaz Paratha (potao and onion stuffed breads) with homemade white butter or Aloo Poori (fried unleavened bread with spicy potato curry). That sounds laden with carbs and fats, but that’s the way of my mother bestowing her love onto her once-in-a-month-visiting son. And I wouldn’t mind that too even.

Pear Baked Oatmeal

So all in all, I love my breakfast. Few days back, I came across this wonderful recipe of baked oatmeal from Heidi Swanson of the famous 101Cookbooks.com.  It’s a layered fruit and milk-soaked oats and nuts one bowl breakfast recipe, which is fast to whip up and is really wholesome too.

Pear Baked Oatmeal

And I would say, it is relatively healthy too, with all the good fats, natural sugar, proteins, minerals and with complex carbohydrates. And the best part is, you could add any seasonal fruits you like in this. It’s the pear season here, all we get in name of fruits these days, are pear and apple. So pear were my obvious choice for this, as I had some in my fridge. And I enjoyed this thoroughly, reading newspaper and listening to my favorite music, with cool breeze flowing in from balcony on a relaxed Saturday morning. Could life be any better than this?

Ingredients

2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup hazelnuts
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp fine-grain salt
2 cups milk
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 large egg
3 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 ripe but firm pears, chopped

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 190 degree C. Butter the inside of 9 inch pie dish.
  2. In a bowl, combine the oats, walnuts, hazelnuts,  baking powder, cinnamon, salt.
  3. In another bowl, whisk the maple syrup, milk, egg, half of the butter and vanilla.
  4. Spread the chopped pear in a layer across the bottom of buttered pie dish.
  5. Sprinkle the oats mixture over top of pear evenly. Drizzle with milk and egg mixture evenly over the oats layer.
  6. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is brown and oats are set. Let cool for few minutes. Drizzle with remaining melted butter and serve.

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars

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Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 1

These crumb cookies bars are definitely going to be your best friends. They come with no frills attached and would truly prove to be your friend in need. When you are hard pressed for time and have to feed a crowd and want a simple no-fuss quick bars, these crumb bars save you a day. Crumbly buttery shortbread bars with a vibrant tart fruit filling sandwiched within.

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 5

These fruity bars are so incredible that they’ll remind you of your best pies and crumbles, but without any sloppy serving of unmanageable serving on a dessert plate. The whole thing is like a breeze. Through in some good ingredients, pop them into oven, cut into squares and voila! Isn’t that sound simple enough?

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 4Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 8

And the best thing is you could add any of your favorite fruit to these bars. As this is the season of stone fruit, my obvious yet favorite choice was these vibrant cherries and plums. Cherries accentuated the color of the fruit filling while plums added to the tartness, which paired well with the buttery and sweet vanilla shortbread.

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 3

These are good enough to be served in breakfast or to be packed in your lunch box to be enjoyed in afternoon snack or to be relished in dessert alongside a generous scoop of very good vanilla ice cream.

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 7

I took them to my family and they were polished real quick. Kids liked them a lot, I couldn’t believe that they accepted a fruit bake so peacefully!

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars

Recipe adapted from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

Cherry & Plum Crumb Bars 2

Ingredients

Crumb
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
90 gm unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
1/2 of a beaten egg
seeds of 1/2 vanilla bean
1/8 tsp salt

Filling
Zest and juice of one lime
1 1/2 cup fresh cherries and plums, pitted and chopped
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp cornstarch

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 180 degree Celsius and line 8 x 8 inch square baking pan with parchment paper, with some extra paper hanging off the two opposite sides of the pan.
  2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, vanilla seeds. With a pastry blender or fork, work the chilled butter and the egg into the flour mixture until mixture resembles a coarse meal.
  3. Pat half the crumb base into the bottom of the prepared pan.
  4. In a bowl of a food processor, briefly pulse the fruit filling ingredients until the fruit is coarsely chopped but not pureed.
  5. Spread the filling over crumb base and sprinkle the remaining crumbs evenly over the fruit.
  6. Bake cookies for 35-40 minutes, until lightly brown on top. Cool completely before cutting into squares.

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake

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Banana Marbled Loaf Cake

Last one week had been tremendously busy and I had been away from this space from quite sometime. My family including my parents, sister, brother and nieces and nephew were here for over a week. And I took one week off from work. I did quite a many baking and  frozen recipes. Though I managed to take some hurried shots of the goodies I made for the kids, I barely got any time left for posting them up here. I spent my morning playing with kids, afternoon baking/cooking in kitchen and evenings in going out for shopping or eating out with family. It was busy but it was hell lot of fun.

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake 2

I ordered my copy of award winning baker and cookbook author Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From my home to yours few days back, after sweet Ruchira, recommended the book. Flipping through the pages, I realized that she was right. “You wouldn’t need any other baking book, after you have this one in your collection.” {Though I know, it would be impossible to resist buying more books… 😛 }

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake 4

The recipes are immensely inspirational and easily doable at home. Along with every recipe, Dorie has also given tips to play around with ingredients to create a new version from the original, effectively leading to a higher number of recipes in book. This book is a must buy for every home baker!

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Puzzled with so many recipes, which I wanted to try from the book, my cute little niece made my problem resolved in just few seconds. She pointed her finger to few of the recipes from the book, one for a day, for the whole week. And if you’ve happened to read my previous post on Chocolate Yogurt Cake, you must have known that how much she only likes chocolate desserts.

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake 3

So the obvious choice for her would have been with chocolate involved in it in some way or other. So we made muffins, loaves and cookies, with dear chocolate. Though we also made some ice creams and frozen pops also, which I’ll be posting about later.

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake 5

This banana marbled loaf cake was the first one to be baked, as kids were really fascinated by those white and black swirls of cake together, after they saw the picture in the book. Swirls didn’t came out that clean, as they should have been. May be I did swirls a little extra, making the batter a bit more muddy. But kids still enjoyed the cake a lot. I did tweaked some of the ingredients in the book {omitted rum, cut down the amount of butter and eggs and compensated that with increasing milk}. It came out super moist and delicately sweet with bananas and had a subtle hint of nutmeg.

Banana Marbled Loaf Cake 6

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 stick plus 2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
2 ripe bananas, peeled
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
grated zest of 1/2 lemon
110 gm dark chocolate, chopped
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
4 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup whole milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 160 degree Celsius and butter and flour an 10 1/2 x 4 x 2 1/2 inch loaf pan. Place the pan on 2 regular baking sheets and keep aside.
  2. Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and nutmeg.
  3. In a small bowl, mash the bananas with lemon juice and zest.
  4. Melt the chocolate with 2 tbsp of butter together in a microwave oven or on a double boiler.
  5. In a separate bowl, beat the butter with an electric mixer, until pale and fluffy. Beat in both the sugars, for about 2-3 minutes.
  6. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, then beat in vanilla.
  7. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add half of the flour mixture, mixing until it is just incorporated.
  8. With mixer running, pour in the  milk and when it is blended, fold in the remaining flour mixture.
  9. Scrape down the bowl and mix in the mashed bananas.
  10. Pour little less than half of the batter over cooled melted chocolate and stir to blend.
  11. Drop alternating spoonfuls of both the batters into the prepared pan, then taking a table knife, swirl the batters together, taking care not to overdo it.
  12. Bake for 1 hour and 20 to 30 minutes with pan over baking sheets, until the knife inserted into the cake comes out clean. If cake starts to brown to much, cover loosely with a foil tent after 40 minutes of baking.
  13. Once done, transfer the cake to a cooling rack and let cool in pan for about 15 minutes before unmolding, then cool the cake to room temperature.
  14. In a bowl, whisk together sugar, egg, coffee, yogurt, chocolate, oil and vanilla, until well combined.
  15. In an another bowl, sift flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
  16. Add the flour mixture to wet mixture and whisk to make a smooth batter.
  17. Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake from 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of cake comes out clean.
  18. Let it cool in pan for 15 minutes and then invert on to wire rack to let cool completely.