It’s Christmas Eve, and if you celebrate Christmas, it’s a time for relaxing with family or friends…or last-minute panicking. I hope it’s the former for you. I’m a little last minute myself, only now writing a post for this week’s French Friday. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about Crème Brûlée, though. My attempt wasn’t beautiful, but it was delicious.
Dorie’s version has a thin layer of jam at the bottom and is cooked at a low temperature. I’m not sure if the two things contributed to the problems many people had getting their brûlées to set, but after hearing on Twitter that this was a problem, I decided to cook mine at a higher temperature. This caused the jam to bubble up a bit, but my custards set well. The recipe calls for the oven to be set at 200° F, but I set it to 325° F and kept an eye on it. I left them in the refrigerator overnight, finishing them in the evening.
I don’t have a kitchen torch, so caramelized the brown sugar under the broiler, which worked well, though the crust was a little uneven. Next time, I’ll push the sugar through a strainer, so that it falls a little more evenly across the custard. I’m also not sure about resting the brûlées on a bed of ice – they were slipping and sliding under the broiler.
No matter, they tasted great.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to join my partner for some more Modern Family and possibly even It’s a Wonderful Life. Have a great holiday.
You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Crème Brûlée
One Wet Foot 
beautiful!
My very favourite dessert!
Despite all of the technical difficulties – these were very tasty.
Glad you enjoyed and were able to work through it.
Merry Christmas!
Ha – love that you “kept it real” when talking about holiday plans vs the panic that can set in. We definitely experienced a bit of both as we decided to do a long distance holiday and drag…I mean pack….everything up to go to Vermont. An adventure for sure, but it has been lovely and filled with yummy food. We will be doing more creme brulee for sure this week. Kudos to you for another FFWD well done and we look forward to enjoying your posts in 2012 !
Looks like you made this recipe work and they do look good with the crackly sugary topping!
Day after Christmas greetings to you, enjoyed following your kitchen adventures this year and look forward to more in 2012;-)
I think they look great. I’m glad you were able to get them to set in the deeper ramekins. I am going to make some more for New Year’s because it was such an easy dessert to make and we had so much fun torching the sugar.
Looks like a success, Teresa! I do love creme brulee. Hope you had a great holiday celebration!
Sounds like the perfect Christmas Eve!
I may need to get in on this twitter thing. It seems like the P&Q post is never up when I have questions about a recipe. It really is helpful to be able to compare notes earlier in the week. Oh well. My only tip is that regular brown sugar is not a great option for creme brulee because it has too much moisture to caramelize nicely. Purists (and Dorie) call for brownulated sugar which is brown sugar which has the consistency of white granulated sugar. Raw sugar should also work if the granules are not too big. But even plain old white granulated sugar will work better than regular brown sugar.