Oven Baked Rice Pudding
(first the basic recipe and then what I did)
basic recipe on the pack of rice I bought:
50g short grain rice
30ml caster sugar
568ml (1 pint) creamy milk
5ml vanilla essence
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
25g sultanas
rinse rice in cold water, put rice, sugar, milk, vanilla, sultanas into a buttered oven proof dish (capacity 1.5 pint), dot with butter and sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake at 150c 300f gas mark 2 for 2 hrs, stir well after 30 min.
I made the following variation:
double the amount of rice (100g)
no sugar
10ml vanilla essence
ground nutmeg
mixed dried fruit chopped up into smaller bits (mine had cherries, blueberries, raisins and cranberries I think)
1.5 pints of formula
half a tub of mascarpone (blobbed around the dish after the other ingredients were in).
I saw on another recipe to put the rice dish inside a bigger dish of water (is this a ban-marie???) so I did that too.
And cooked in the oven for 1 hr 45 rather than the 2 hrs as it looked quite brown on the top (I stirred once at 30 mins).
It made a thick cake type rice pudding which was brilliant cold as finger food for DS. Nana and I enjoyed it that way too and some of it I dolloped into a saucepan and added a bit of milk to make it thinner to eat off a spoon - very yummy!
If your LO is just starting finger foods you might want to skip the dried fruit depending on if you are confident they can manage it but bare in mind that this is sweetening the pudding (and it was sweet enough without any sugar).
If you're stuck at home during the am or pm nap etc it is quite a good recipe to make as it only takes a few mins to get it into the oven and then you can put the oven timer on and get on with the other stuff without having to stand stirring a pot of rice.
