Gingery baked nectarines

You know how sometimes you have guests around, whip a dish out of the oven, plate it, serve it, snap off a couple of photos that you think will be OK, and then put away the camera and get back to socialising?  And you know how sometimes those unplanned photos can be the best?  Well, sometimes the opposite also holds true and the photos are just ghastly, and no amount of fiddling in Photoshop will fix them 🙁

So you are going to have to take my word for the fact that these taste a lot better than the photo makes them look.

I love nectarines – they come in useful as a breakfast, as a summery starter, as an addition to salads, and as a dessert.  Together with some sort of baked apple dish, they are my favourite short-notice standby dessert, but when my friends Greg and Gail came to visit over the summer, I decided to try something a little more ambitious than my usual stick-em-in-the-oven approach.

I had some leftover ginger nut (ginger snap) cookies from making my glorious white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, so I decided to use them to make a filling of sorts for the nectarines, to make the dessert slightly more substantial and to add a bit of zing to the sweetness.  Coming after the starter of green bean, broad bean and mozzarella salad and a main of salmon en croute, these were the perfect light ending to the meal.  If only the camera could have captured their taste instead of their looks!

GINGERY BAKED NECTARINES (serves 4)

Ingredients

4 large, ripe nectarines
4-6 ginger nuts/snaps
25 ml medium cream sherry
soft brown sugar
mascarpone or Greek yoghurt to serve

Method

Place the ginger biscuits in a single layer in a flat dish and pour the sherry over them.  Leave to stand for hald an hour or until the sherry has softened the biscuits enough for you to mash them into a paste.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C.  Halve the nectarines and remove their pits.  Fill the hollow of each half with the ginger biscuit paste and sprinkle with soft brown sugar.

Place the nectarines halves hollow side up in an oven proof dish and bake for about 15 minutes or until the flesh is soft and the sugar has melted.  Serve warm with mascarpone or Greek yoghurt.

Oh, and make sure your dining room is well-lit so that your pictures look vaguely edible!

I was planning to submit this for this month’s Heart of the Matter event but I see I have missed the deadline due to various unhappy events in my off-blog life.  So I’m just going to fling myself at Ilva‘s mercy and even if she does not include me, do go and check out her roundup of heart-friendly fruit recipes.