Chocolate Pear Mugs

This recipe is pretty easy to throw together with pears and a few ingredients we usually have on hand.  You could also use apples, or a mix of pears and apples!  It's a nice, sweet dessert with no butter (so ZERO saturated fat) and at least 1 (depending on how much fruit you use) of your 5-a-day.

First preheat your oven to 320F/160C/140C for a fan oven
Then, peel and cut up your pears.  I used 4 small ones.

Put them in a saucepan with a lid and squeeze the juice of half a lemon over them.

Sprinkle the pears with 1 tbsp. of whatever sugar you like.  I used caster (extra fine sugar), because that's what I had, but you can also use muscavado (brown) sugar.

 Drizzle a little vanilla extract over the pears.

Cover and bring the mixture to a boil, then let it simmer.  The pears will make more liquid, so even though it doesn't sound like you can bring a pan of pears to a boil- you can.  Let it cook for about 10 minutes.  Keep an eye on it and stir it occasionally.  Make sure that the fruit doesn't start to stick or burn.  It should be fine, but check it to be safe.

 It should look like this.  Take the lid off and keep simmering it for another 10 minutes or so until the liquid reduces.  Stir it occasionally.

While your cooking the pear, you can prepare the topping.  Start by beating an* egg white.

Bet it until the egg is pretty stiff.

 Take 50g of powdered sugar and 1 tbsp. on cocoa.  (Or if you're like me, realize that you only have 30g of powdered sugar, so use caster sugar for the other 20.  If you look real close, you can see the 2 kinds of sugar on the plate!)

Sift the sugar and cocoa into a bowl.

Add in 25g of ground almond.

Stir it all together.

Add the stiff egg white.

Stir it gently into the sugar mix.

Keep stirring and realize that you need more egg white.

Beat a second egg white and add it to the mix. (*You could, of course, just do 2 egg whites at once.  But what fun would that be? :))

See!  That's better!

Put 2 oven-safe mugs on a baking sheet.

By now, your pears should look like this:

Divide the pears between the mugs.  Psst, you can add a tbsp. of liqueur or congac if you're feeling fancy.

Divide the chocolate mixture between the mugs as well.

 Cook it for 25 minutes.  If you didn't run out of powdered sugar, you could sprinkle a little on top to make it look nice. (This is even more delicious with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or Swedish Glace on top!)

Delicious!