Simplest 4 Ingredient Strawberry Custard Pots!

Did you (like me) overbuy on the wonderful sweet summer strawberries? Need a simple dessert that will please anything from 2 to 10 people? These simple strawberry and sour cream baked custard pots will use up lots of strawberries and produce a wonderful, comforting dessert!

I must apologise for the not so great photos. The light was dropping rapidly and I was trying to do lots of things at once. And while I was taking photos of these it dawned on me. I am a workaholic and I am my own worst enemy.

I should rewind a bit. We had fled to the Blue Mountains for some much needed relaxation and a break. But with a lot of restaurants closed at night early in the week I decided to cook dinner rather than buy takeaway. I fossicked around the kitchen cupboards of the place we were staying at and spied these gorgeous little white cast iron enamel ramekins and exclaimed, "Ooh how cute!!" and suddenly I was blogging again.

The quick trip was a request from Mr NQN. On New Year's Eve and I asked him if he had enjoyed his holidays. "No," he said solemnly before adding with a petulant edge, "You keep making me do things." It was true, just the day before I told him that we needed to make good on our plan to renovate the balcony in time for NYE guests. The only problem was that it was 35°C/95°F. We had been talking for about 3 years about what to do and we knew what we wanted to do, we just had never implemented our plans. After a very sweaty day of work the balcony looked great but it almost did us both in. I even think Mr NQN has some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because now he won't go out on the balcony!

But I digress, back to these pots. They're so simple. I had a few punnets of strawberries from an overbuying session and they perhaps would not last much longer. So I cut these up, combined these with sour cream, sugar and an egg and baked them in these little pots. Oh they were heavenly-a creamy custard with tartish berries. Feel free to add more sugar if your berries are tart. I found that strawberries have really varied this year-some are sweet, some aren't. And with only 15 minutes in the oven you could probably even do these on a 35 degree day! ;)

So tell me Dear Reader, while you're on holidays are you good at relaxing? Or do you fall into the pattern of working and renovating and doing things that you don't ordinarily have the time to do? And have you got a bit crazy buying anything this year?

Baked Sour Cream and Strawberries

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Serves 2 (but easily adaptable to many more)

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 15 minutes

• 200g/7ozs. of strawberries
• 4 tablespoons sour cream (you can also use regular cream if that's what you've got)
• 1 egg
• 3 teaspoons vanilla sugar

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 180C/350F and have two ramekins ready. Wash and hull the strawberries and cut into quarters or sixths (sixths for those enormous ones). Whisk the sour cream, egg and vanilla together with 2 teaspoons of the sugar. Pour over the strawberries and bake for 15. Sprinkle with extra sugar-you can place it under the grill if you want or serve it as it is.