Crémé Bruleé, Crémé Bruleé, Crémé Bruleé!

Wheeeeeeee!

I was so excited about making this dessert that I probably generated more heat from running around the house than the oven did from baking the bruleé itself.

I’m a desserter. I could quite happily live on desserts alone for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t live for a terrible long time because of all the fat and cholesterol that would cause a revolt in my arteries, but hot damn what an awesome way to die.

Vanilla Bean Crémé Bruleé!

Ingredients (i.e. The Stuff):

2 vanilla bean pods

2 1/2 cups whipping/fresh cream. Now, I get terribly confused with creams. I looked at Thickened Cream, Fresh Cream, Pure Cream and Unthickened Cream before I just gave up and grabbed whichever one had the word “whipping” in larger-than-2pt font on the carton. I ended up with this stuff, http://www.dairyfarmers.com.au/df/files/products/range_image_large/dairy-p1-cream300.jpg, which worked rather perfectly. AND, the word “whipping” was plastered all over the back.

8 egg yolks (do what I did and keep the whites in a bowl and cover and refridgerate to make meringues with later)

1/4 cup fine sugar – I used caster sugar, which was perfect. Just make sure it’s NOT icing sugar, as that’s too powdery. It must be granulated. MUST. MUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUST!

That said, you also need about a cup of icing (confectioner’s) sugar for the awesome blow-torchy-bit. I say a cup because then you can make the crackly layer as thick or thin as you like.

How Tooooooooooooooooooooooo (i.e. The Fun Part)!

1. Go out and buy 4 medium sized (like roughly the same size as a tea cup) ramekin dishes from your local homewares boutique. If you read the recipe for pear and plum crumble earlier on, you may have seen the step suggesting something of similar requirements. Well, you should really hev anticipated this dish and bought some smaller ramekins while you were there, shouldn’t you? Yes, you should have. But you didn’t, so now the joke’s on you.

1B. Buy a chef’s blowtorch. You can do the crackly-top step under the grill, but it’s boring and silly, so don’t. Plus, it’s a damned blowtorch! AWESOME! I got mine from Dick Smith’s. I’m guessing a place like Circuit City in the US has the same thing.

2. Preheat your oven to 180 Deg-C. (I love saying that. Sounds so technical. Kinda like I expect Hugh Laurie to yell DEG-C, STAT, DAMNIT! in the middle of House). BEFORE YOU DO THIS, HOWEVER. Please, please, please for the love of puppies and modular synthesisers, make sure you have taken all racks out except for one, and that it is in the middle of the oven.

3. No really. Go move the racks. Now. NOW, NOW, NOW!

4. Slit the vanilla beans all the way down one side so they are still in one piece but the seeds are exposed.

5. Now just sit down for a moment, vanilla bean in hand, and breathe in. Really breathe in. You may not like the smell of vanilla that you get from candles and hand creams but I swear to L. Ron Hubbard you will love this. Real-vanilla-bean-smell has an oily, silky, dusky scent that isn’t anywhere NEAR the tripe you get from fake fragrances.

6. Okay, once you’ve had your fill, plonk the two pods into a medium saucepan and pour the cream over them. Heat the cream (medium-high on your stove dial-knobby-thing) until it’s definitely steaming and ALMOST boiling, but not quite. I didn’t have to wait for very long, maybe 5 minutes. Stir with a good whisk a few times but don’t get too epileptic.

7. As soon as you can feel the heat coming off it and the steam gets thicker, turn the heat off and move the saucepan off the hotplate. Grab a newspaper, book or a 20-minute workout DVD (OMG CALORIESSSSSSSSSSSS) or something and leave it alone for a while so the vanilla-aweomeness can steep.

8. Once you’ve PUMPED UP THE JAM, YO or whatever they say on these workout DVDs, take a damn shower. You’re sweating. Ugh.

9. Fish out the vanilla beans from the cooling cream. Get a sharp vegetable knife and for God’s sake don’t cut yourself. OH WELL DONE, IDIOT, NOW YOU’RE BLEEDING ALL OVER THE VANILLA BEANS.

10. Use the blade to scrape horizontally down the split in the pod (the opposite, 90 degree angle of how you would normally use a knife) and collect the tiny, tiny, tiny little black seeds-of-goodness.

11. Collect as many of the seeds as possible and throw them back into the pan with the cream. Give it a quick stir and reheat softly, softly, slowly, slowly. It doesn’t need to be hot, just warmed up again.

12. While that’s warming, get another whisk (I’m too lazy to use a fork) and whisk the sugar and egg yolks until they pale up and the mix looks silky. This takes about two-three minutes of continuous whisking, so make sure you get someone else to do it for you.

13. Once the sugar looks dissolved a little (don’t worry if it’s not after a fwe minutes, just stir for a little longer), add a little bit of the cream and stir. Use the whisk if you want to, but I’d suggest using a wooden spoon to prevent too much aeration and not enough sexy-bruleé-ness.

14. Gradually add (this does not mean add a little bit at the beginning and then just whollop all the rest in at once because you’re too lazy to mix, pour, mix, mix, pour like the rest of us.) the cream to the egg mix, stirring all the while. This step is somehow incredibly soothing. I love this part. I love the sound the mixture makes and the aroma you get. It’s like kneading dough, or watching a montage of someone baking a delectable cake in a romantic comedy film. No idea why. I just get this mental iamge of a beam of golden light surrounding my kitchen while I magically turn into Nigella Lawson with blonde hair and fatter cheeks.

15. This step is optional. You can strain the mixture (just get really fine cheesecloth/muslin/old lacy curtain material) back into the pan to silky-it-out a little more, or you can not. I don’t, because I love the little vanilla seeds floating about in the custard. So, while it’s optional, don’t do it. Just don’t. It looks better. For serious!

16. Pour the mixture into your ramekin dishes. Make sure one of them has more than the other three (or however many you’re making) so that you get more. Whenever someone complains that you get more than they do, take their bruleé away from them and add it to yours.

17. Place the dishes into a baking tray/roasting pan and pour warm water (not super extra ultra mondo hot, just nicely warm) into the roasting pan around the dishes until it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins.

18. Get someone else to lift the tray onto the middle rack of your oven. You’ve just been steeping, whisking and mixing, so you deserve a break. Have a drink while they do this. Explain to them the amount of effort you went to in making this dessert, and that the ramekin dishes are hand-thrown by forty one-armed children in Peru who spent 92 hours a day gathering the porcelain (shh) from the unforgiving wastelands of Porcelania while their slave masters drink fresh mango nectar harvested by the childrens’ one-legged mothers from the hanging gardens of Babylon. Inform them that these children would then cart the collected porcelain WITHOUT A CART back to Peru (which is a sixty-year trek through the Mines of Morea) to crush the pieces into a fine powder using only their remaining elbows and then combine the powder with crystalised baby duck tears to form perfect ramekins, which are then imported by goose directly to your door.

19. Once you have re-made the mixture after your helper shattered the dishes under the pure mental pressure and placed the new ones on the rack in your oven, bake for 20-25 minutes. Do what I did, though, and start on about 23 minutes. That way you’re either going to hit the jackpot or end up with slightly undercooked custard, which is fine, because you can leave it for a little longer. The dishes are ready when the custard has JUUUUUST but still bobbles in the middle when touched.

20. (Yes, I know, 20 half-steps for a 7-step dessert?) Once done, turn the oven off and open the door. Leave the ramekins in the water in the tray to cool. Once at room temperature ish, throw them (not literally, you twit) into the fridge for AT LEAST 3 hours, 4 being better. If you’re as weak-willed as I am, you can taste a little bit of one at 2 hours.

21. Once your 3-4 hours has elapsed and you are ready to serve, get your blowtorch and the icing/confectioner’s sugar. Once you’re done setting fire to your house by playing with the torch (which is fun), make sure your sugar has NO lumps. Lumps = weird knobbly bits of sugar that don’t melt properly when you torch them, so sift that sugar good. Now sift it! Into shape! Shape it up! Get straight! Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it! It’s not too late! To sift it! SIFT IT GOOD!

22. Wow, what a ridiculously awesome song.

23. ANYWAY! Once you’ve removed all the lumps from the icing sugar, either dust over each ramekin dish or use a tablespoon to tap it over. I use the tablespoon method so you get a thicker layer, but it does take a little longer to crackle.

24. Fire up (bahahah) your blowtorch and heat the sugar until it melts and hardens. It should caramelise fairly easily and this is seriously the funnest part of the whole recipe, so go nuts!

25. Serve! But make sure you get the biggest one.

26. And stop playing with the damned blowtorch!

~ by araneux on November 25, 2008.