Challenge Accepted: Crème Brûlée

Per my mom's request yesterday, I made some individual crème brûlées for dessert. It has been several years since I last made these burnt sugar topped custards, but luckily my experience making crème caramels through the bakery internship earlier this year made it go pretty smoothly. At least up until I got to the torching part.

This recipe called for pure vanilla flavor, which I was instructed to get by grinding up half a vanilla bean with some sugar in a coffee grinder. I had only ever used the vanilla bean seeds before, so this was definitely a new experience for me. I did not realize that the outer hull of the bean pod was also edible.

So I began by chopping up the vanilla bean into small pieces, then placing those with about 1/4 cup of sugar in my parents' old coffee bean grinder. After a few minutes of grinding, it came out as a nice powdery substance.

Next I heated 1 cup heavy with 1 cup half and half in a medium saucepan, just enough to get some steam, and added the vanilla sugar mixture. I stirred it around until it seemed pretty evenly distributed.

Next was slowly pouring the warm cream mixture into a bowl with 1 egg and 4 egg yolks (which were previously whisked together). The trick with this is to pour it bit by bit down the side of the bowl at first, then whisking it in quickly, since you don't want to cook the eggs.











And then I distributed the custard among 5 ramekins (I only photographed these three for the purposes of this blog since the others are different sizes), and put them into the oven with a water bath (fill up the tray about 1/3 the way up the sides of the ramekins). This is extremely important as it keeps the custards from burning on the bottom.

These cooked at 325 F for about 40 minutes and were then removed from the water bath to cool for a few minutes before chilling. They stayed in the refrigerator the rest of the day until it was time to prepare the burnt topping for serving after dinner.

So...this is the part that got tricky. We had not opened this kitchen torch for several years and while I did a quick test to make sure it worked, I was not prepared for the fact that it would not last. Before I could find that out, however, I sprinkled the white/brown sugar mixture I had put together (dry out 1/4 cup of each in a slightly heated oven and then grind in a food processor until find) over the tops of the custards.

After several attempts to keep the torch on, I managed to get one pretty well caramelized topping, which I then served to my dad with a few raspberries.


                                                                    Voilà ! Vanilla Crème Brûlée.

Hogwarts Cake

It has taken me awhile to get around to this post, but I figured I should finally do it before it's too late. A couple weeks ago, I made one of my best friends a Harry Potter themed cake. This is something I've thought about doing for years but was always too intimidated to try, as there are so many options and most of it would require intricate detail. Well, since this year has been so Harry Potter centric for the two of us (which I will not go into detail about for all of your sakes), I decided it was time to finally tackle it. And it would be the first time I celebrated this friend's birthday in several years, so I figured this cake had to be special. I looked up ideas for Harry Potter themed cakes and tried to take from several of them, focusing mostly on the idea of recreating Hogwarts Castle. The examples I looked at all seemed complicated and time-consuming, so I opted to only make one tower and two small buildings just so it looked recognizable enough. 

These were made with gingerbread and decorated with royal icing that I dyed with food coloring. I made these a couple days before assembling the rest of the cake. Oh, the tower was made by rolling gingerbread dough around a cardboard cylinder covered in foil, and then I slid the cardboard out before baking it standing up just like that.

Next I made marshmallow fondant and rolled out a Hogwarts crest, which I also decorated with royal icing. I then used more fondant to make a small Hedwig owl, a snitch that I planned to attach by wire (so it looked as though it was flying), and a broom. So far the pieces seemed to be coming together pretty nicely. This was also done a couple days before the rest of the cake.










Last but not least was the actual cake. I wanted it to be lemon flavored (since one of the people who would be eating it was allergic to both chocolate and vanilla), so I followed a basic white cake recipe and substituted lemon extract for the vanilla. I then separated the batter into eight different bowls (luckily my parents have a large assortment of mixing bowls to spare in their kitchen) and dyed each one a different Harry Potter House color. Red and gold for Gryffindor, blue and bronze for Ravenclaw, green and silver for Slytherin, and yellow and black for Hufflepuff. The plan was to create a 4-layer checkboard cake with each layer representing a different House.

These were then baked off and stacked on top of each other with black buttercream frosting in between and on top, to create a sort of dark starry night look.

After it was cut into

And lastly, I assembled the pieces onto the cake in the most logical way I could think of, especially since there was not much room for it all. The cake managed to stay standing during the transport and while Hedwig did fall off once, she was easy to reattach once the destination was reached. The snitch also stayed in place pretty well, much to my surprise.

 

While there were many things I would fix next time, all in all I am quite pleased with how it turned out. And I think my friend was too. :)