Butter and brown sugar baked pears with rice pudding

Diana Henry
·2-min read
Butter and brown sugar baked pears with rice pudding
These are just as excellent by themselves with a dollop of cream - Haarala Hamilton & Valerie Berry

Conference pears are good for this as they’re slim and the right size for pears that are going to be served with rice pudding (you’ll just have eaten a lot of chilli). If you would rather do something easier then make the pears and serve them on their own with cream. A biscuit would be good alongside. Likewise, you can just make the rice pudding and serve it with quince, redcurrant or apple jelly. You only need a small amount of jelly for each person.

Overview

Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

3 hrs

Serves

8

Ingredients

For the pears

  • 8 pears (not overripe and not too hard either)

  • 45g butter, cut into small cubes

  • juice of ½ lemon

  • 75g soft dark brown sugar

For the rice pudding

  • 50g butter, plus extra for greasing

  • 35g caster sugar

  • 100g short-grain pudding rice

  • 1l whole milk

  • 150ml double cream

  • generous grating of fresh nutmeg

  • finely grated zest of ½ lemon

  • ¼ tsp vanilla extract

Method

Step 1

Heat the oven to 190C/180C fan/gas mark 5. Halve 8 pears from stem to base. You don’t need to core them, and leave the stalks intact if possible.

Step 2

Put the pears in a roasting tin or a large gratin dish where they can all fit snugly in a single layer. If there’s too much room around them the sugar and butter that run off the pears can burn. Arrange them cut-side up and dot 45g cubed butter over them equally, squeeze over the juice of ½ lemon then sprinkle on 75g soft dark brown sugar.

Step 3

Bake in the oven. It can take as much as an hour for the pears to become tender and golden, but check every 10 minutes from 35 minutes onwards as it depends on how ripe they are. Baste with the juices each time.

Step 4

For the rice pudding, turn down the oven to 150C/140C fan/gas mark 2.

Step 5

Butter a 2-litre baking dish. Put all the ingredients for the rice pudding into a large saucepan and heat gently, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Simmer for 3-4 minutes, stirring all the time, until you can feel that the grains of rice have swollen slightly.

Step 6

Pour the mixture into the prepared dish and bake for 2 hours. By this time the rice should be cooked and creamy, but it should not be dry or overly sticky.

Step 7

Warm the pears in the oven then transfer to a serving dish. Serve the rice pudding in the dish in which you’ve baked it, with the fruit and all its juices alongside.

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