Recipe - Baked mushrooms with ricotta and pesto

This is a scrummy recipe that was in my BBC Good Food Magazine, it is one of our favourites, and they still taste great cold. I normally put them out at Christmas on a buffet table, they are perfectly bite sized and smell delicious. Use normal mushrooms if you can't find the chestnut, also great in the large field mushrooms as a main course for Veggies.

Baked mushrooms with ricotta and pesto

The rich pesto helps balance the tangy ricotta and earthy mushroom flavours of this easy starter.
Takes 35-45 minutes. Serves 4 as a starter

Vegetarian

Ingredients
5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
16 medium chestnut mushrooms
250g tub ricotta
2 tbsp green pesto
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
25g/1oz freshly grated parmesan
1 rounded tbsp pesto and
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley, preferably flatleaf, to serve

Method
Preheat the oven to 200C/gas 6/fan 180C. Choose an ovenproof dish big enough to take all the mushrooms in one layer and generously brush it with 1 tbsp of the oil.
Trim the mushroom stalks level with their caps, if you need to, then put the mushrooms, rounded cap side down, in the dish. Mix the ricotta, pesto and garlic and spoon into the mushrooms (there's enough to pile it up quite high). Sprinkle over the parmesan and drizzle over the rest of the oil.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until the mushrooms are soft all the way through and the cheese is just starting to turn golden. If this doesn't happen, put the dish under a preheated grill for a few minutes. If the mushrooms gave given off a lot of juice after baking, you can drain some of it off.
To serve, blob a little pesto on top of each mushroom and scatter with the parsley.

Serve hot or at room temperature.