Crème Brûlée

Crème Brûlée

Ingredients:
1 qt. heavy cream
8 large egg yolks
1 cup (~6.5 oz.) white sugar
1 vanilla bean*

Preheat oven to 325°F. 

Split and scrape vanilla bean. Place vanilla bean, vanilla bean seeds, 1/2 c. sugar, and heavy cream in a large sauce pan over medium heat. Stir to incorporate. Scald, but do not boil. 

Meanwhile, whisk together remaining sugar and egg yolks. When the heavy cream mixture is almost at a boil, remove from heat and temper the yolks (add and quickly stir in a little of the hot cream at a time. Otherwise, you get scrambled eggs!) Until all your mixture is whisked together. If it won't fit into your bowl, pour tempered yolks into the pan and whisk together. 
*If you do not have a vanilla bean, substitute with vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract, but add them now, after the mixture has been removed from the heat.

If you are cooking ahead, you can stop here, cool and refrigerate the mixture up to 3 days before baking. 

Now, you are ready to finish your crème brûlée off in the oven. Place a tea towel on the bottom of a roasting pan or a 9x13 cake pan. Place ramekins on top of the towel. Carefully fill the ramekins with the custard mixture. Place any remaining mixture into the refrigerator. You can keep it for about 3 days. 

Next, you need to fill the pan with HOT water about half way up the side of your ramekins. THIS IS IMPORTANT! DO NOT GET ANY WATER INTO YOUR RAMEKINS. If you do, your beautiful custard will NEVER SET and all your work was for naught. :( 

I usually place the pan in the oven, then carefully ever so slowly add hot water to the roasting pan. Then gently slide it into the oven. The more shallow ramekins make this harder. 

Bake until set, but still jiggly. This takes about 20 min, but can be more or less depending on the ramekin size.

Refrigerate a minimum of 2 hours. Nothing says nasty like a hot crème brûlée. Just before serving, dust the top with some sugar and "brûlée" with a torch. FOLLOW SAFETY PROCEDURES! If you don't know how to do this, Alton Brown has a video. 

Fraisier

I made a French strawberry cake for my husband's birthday. 

I made a genoise. 

Then, made a batch of pastry cream.

2 cups milk
3/4 c. sugar
pinch of salt
4 large egg yolks
5 tbsp. cornstarch
1 vanilla bean (or 1 tbsp. vanilla extract)
2 tbsp butter
3 sheets of gelatin (bloomed in cold water)

Place milk in sauce pan. Slice vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape the seeds out with a knife. Place bean and seeds in the milk. Bring milk to a boil on high heat. Meanwhile, Whisk together sugar, salt and cornstarch. Whisk in egg yolks. 
When milk comes to a boil, slowly whisk into sugar/egg mixture to temper eggs. Then, add back to pan. Cook on high heat stirring constantly for one minute or until it thickens.
Next, strain pastry cream through a fine sieve to catch any egg bits, vanilla bean, and lumps. 
Drain the water from the gelatin and add into pastry cream while it is still hot. Stir in to melt. Add in the butter. If you are using vanilla extract you can add it in at this point. Allow to cool completely in fridge. 

When pastry cream is completely cool. Whip up 1 c. of heavy whipping cream. Add in almond extract to taste and 1 tbsp. Grand Marnier. Gently fold whipped cream into pastry cream. 

Layer genoise, brush with syrup of choice. Layer with strawberries and the cream. Top with jam, marzipan, or both! I used the ring from my spring form pan to build the cake on a plate, and it worked out great.

Sorry no pictures! They ate all the evidence before I found my camera! Too bad because it was prettier than the last one. Here's the picture of last year's cake.