Baked Eggs

Creamy, dippy, and oh so lovely to look at.  This is a charming way to change up breakfast in your home.  

4 eggs (two for each ramekin)
1 tablespoon cream or half and half
1/2 teaspoon butter
freshly grated parmesan cheese
kosher salt and cracked black pepper to taste
2 slices bacon, lightly cooked

Preheat oven to 375.  In a teakettle, boil water to fill your baking dish. You are going to cook these in a water bath so the eggs cook more evenly throughout.  So you want to line a baking dish with a folded paper towel (so the ramekins don't slide around and also so they don't sit directly on the hot dish).  Butter the ramekins and season with salt and paper, place inside baking dish.  Fill each ramekin with 1/2 tablespoon cream.  When water boils, carefully pour the water into the baking dish so it comes up half the sides of the ramekins.  Place baking dish in the oven and cook until the cream starts to bubble a bit.  Remove dish from oven and coil your bacon around the sides of the ramekins.  (This is how my recipe suggests, but after eating this I think I would crumble the bacon on the bottom of the dish instead.  Once they were cooked it was a little tricky cutting the bacon with your fork.  You almost needed a knife). Very carefully crack your eggs into the ramekins, season with a little more salt and pepper, top with remaining cream a small dollop of butter and grated parmesan cheese.  Place back in the oven and bake for 7-10 minutes, or until the egg is opaque bit still jiggles slightly in the ramekin.  The egg will continue to cook once they are removed from the oven, so be careful not to overcook.  Serve with toast so you can sop up the creamy-wonderfulness of the eggs.

Cooking Note:
Today when I made these, I didn't have any half and half on hand nor real butter. So I tried them out using 1% milk and margarine.  And guess what, they were wonderful!  Sure they weren't quite as rich then if I used the full fat options.  But they were still completely creamy and delicious- and now a wonderful low fat recipe!  Awesome discovery!


**pay no attention to the tiny red dot on my egg.  It wasn't a bad egg, but merely a dot of food coloring.  I somehow got a dot of it in my butter when I made the cornflake cookies.  I have issues with food coloring.  I can never seem to keep it where it supposed to go, but instead on my fingers, countertop and now my butter.