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Pear Baked Oatmeal

September 17, 2013 by TheWhiteRamekins

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.

Filed Under: Breakfast Tagged With: autumn, baked oatmeal, breakfast, fall recipes, food, fruits, healthy, pear

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake

October 29, 2012 by TheWhiteRamekins

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake 7

Get me a chocolate cake when you come home Mama. No other flavor please !!! These are the words which I get to hear from my 4 year old sweet little niece on Thursday nights when I would be going home on weekend. Chocolate has spelled it’s magic over the little girl. She wouldn’t mind asking for a second helping. Though her mother wouldn’t let her loose. Which is good in fact, because there has to be someone who keeps a tab over all the pampering a kid gets.

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake

And truly, it’s not just the kiddo who gets all the fun. There is a parity when it comes to reward. The acceptance of a chocolate cake by a 4 year old is as huge as getting your food reviewed by a renowned critic. And in order to survive the criticism, it lies on me to get a good recipe every other time. I came across this dark chocolate cake with pears sometimes back, if I can recall correctly, it was last year when the pears had left the market. And I was left with no other choice but to wait for the next autumn.

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake 2

But this time, I got engrossed in too many other activities; restaurant reviews, blog events, a failed attempt to move from wordpress.com to wordpress.org {more on that later}. And that recipe never re-occurred to me, even when the carts and shelves were loaded with this sweet fragrant fruit, until I got the call from my niece on last Thursday.

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake 4

This cake has got lots of brown sugar, which not only gives it a dark color but also a hint of caramel infused through deep and intense flavor of a good quality cocoa. And the soft and mushy chunks of pear make it more moist, because of which it can be kept for 2 days. In case, you want a bit of crunch as well, feel free to add nuts of your choice, like I added chopped whole almonds. And the best part is that you get an excuse of baking this cake more often because of all the healthy ingredients which go in to; brown sugar, olive oil, almonds, pears. So don’t stop yourself from baking this, if you are thinking it as just another chocolate cake.

Chocolate Almond Pear Cake 8

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup boiling water
1 cup olive oil
2 cups brown sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 pears diced
1/2 cup chopped almonds

Instructions

  1. Whisk together flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl and keep aside.
  2. Add cocoa powder to boiling water and mix well.
  3. In a separate bowl, whisk together oil, sugar and vanilla extract.
  4. Beat in eggs one by one until smooth.
  5. Add half of the flour mix into egg mix and beat well.
  6. Add in cocoa liquid to the batter and add rest of the flour and mix well.
  7. Fold in the chopped almonds and pear.
  8. Pour the batter in a 9 inch greased spring form cake tin and bake for about 1 hour at 180 degree C preheated oven, until the tester inserted into the center of cake comes out clean.
  9. Let cool in tin for 10 minutes and then invert on to wire rack to let cool completely.
  10. Sprinkle some icing sugar over top, while serving.

Filed Under: cake Tagged With: baking with fruits, chocolate, food, pear

Ginger Panna Cotta With Pomegranate and Pear

September 19, 2012 by TheWhiteRamekins

Last weekend was quite busy and I didn’t get enough time to spend on something elaborate. So I thought to put together some low fat cream with some hung curd to make these luscious and velvety smooth panna cotta.

Instead of settling down for the regular vanilla bean flavor, I tried to be a bit experimental and went ahead with infusing my panna cotta with the warm and earthy flavored ginger. The flavor of ginger did wonders to the panna cotta and gave them a whole new identity.

That’s the good thing about panna cotta. You can add flavors of your choice. Let your imagination as loose as you can, yet you will never go wrong, you bet.

Add espresso, chocolate shavings, fruits, coulis inside, above , beneath, wherever and whichever way you want. I paired them my ginger panna cotta with some leftover pear {which were ripe enough to be caramelized} and some pomegranate.

Ingredients

Panna Cotta

2 tbsp cold water
2 tsp unflavored powdered gelatin
1 cup low fat cream
1/3 cup sugar
1 inch stem ginger
2 cup plain whole milk hung yogurt

Caramelized Pears

2 Pears, chored, pealed and diced
2 tbsp light brown sugar
1 tbsp unsalted butter

Pomegranate seeds

Instructions

For panna cotta:

  1. In a bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over cold water and let it sit for 5 minutes.
  2. In a heavy bottom saucepan, mix cream with shredded ginger and sugar. Heat the cream mixture until it starts to boil.
  3. Remove from heat and add the gelatin and whisk until dissolved.
  4. Whisk in the yogurt and pour the mix into glasses or ramekins. Let stand in fridge for at least 4 hours.
  5. While serving, top them with pomegranate seeds or caramelized pears.

For caramelized pears:

  1. Heat the butter and sugar in a saucepan until starts sizzling.
  2. Add the chopped pears and saute them until they start to become translucent. Remove from heat and chill them in fridge.

Filed Under: Creams Tagged With: caramelized pears, food, ginger, Panna Cotta, pear, pomegranate

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Hi! I'm Himanshu - a home chef who loves to cook, bake, style and photo shoot... Read More…

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