Blog Archives: January, 2004
Crème Brulée
Crème brulée This week, on Cooking with Combinatorialists, we’re making Crème Brulée. My mom asked what I wanted for dessert for my birthday dinner, and I answered “crème brulée”.
It’s such a good and rarely-served dessert that you would think it difficult, but in fact we found it to be a very easy dish to make. We had to adjust cooking and caramelizing times (just keep looking until it looks ready), but other than that, the recipe covers it all.
Classic Crème Brulée
Ingredients:
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 4 egg yolks
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
- 8 tsp. fine raw sugar or granulated sugar for caramelizing
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 300°F and have a pot of hot water ready.
- In a saucepan over medium heat, combine cream and 1/4 cup sugar; cook, stirring, until steam rises, 4-5 minutes.
- In a bowl, beat egg yolks and vanilla until blended.
- Gradually pour hot cream into yolks, stirring constantly.
- Strain mixture through a fine-mesh sieve set over a bowl, divide among four 7-oz ramekins.
- Line a 3″ deep baking pan with a clean kitchen towel, place ramekins in pan, and add hot water to fill pan halfway up the side of the ramekins.
- Cover loosely with foil. Bake until set, 30-35 minutes, until the centers of the custards shake gently when the pan is shifted.
- Remove the pan from the oven and allow the ramekins to cool slightly. Remove the ramekins from the pan, cool to room temperature, then chill thoroughly 3 hours or overnight.
- Just before serving, sprinkle the custards with 2 tsp. sugar and caramelize the topping with a kitchen torch, or place the ramekins under a broiler, 2-3 inches from the heat source for 3-4 minutes. Watch carefully.
Makes 4 servings. From http://www.nielsenmassey.com/recipe15.htm.
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Something I forgot about Canada
Driving home tonight after meeting a friend for coffee, I became worried when I saw the two cars in front of me pull off the road and then the car behind me pull off as well. I looked around to try to spot an emergency vehicle, and then noticed the Tim Horton’s that they were all stopping at. I love this country.
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From Windsor to Windsor
(I’ve decided that it would be unconscionable for me to go a whole month without updating my blog and so I have to write this entry, but I’m not sure I have too much to say. Let’s give it a try anyway. This would have been my last entry before leaving England.)
I happily (and correctly, I hope) finished my final projects after returning from Portugal. That’s two classes down, three (plus a little thing called a thesis) to go. And none of my future courses will be about probability, so things are looking good. (Hilary term’s lectures are Algebraic Number Theory, Categories Proofs and Games, and Randomness and Complexity.)
Approaching Windsor Castle The day before I left England for Windsor (Ontario), I made a trip to Windsor (England). Windsor Castle is the largest and oldest continuously-occupied castle in the world, and the Queen is in official residence twice a year, in April and June (as such, she missed dining with me; her loss). One of the highlights of the tour was visiting St. George’s Hall, which displays the shields of all the knights of the Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric order in Britain; members of the 24-person order include Prince Charles, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and Baroness (Margaret) Thatcher. Along the way I saw a suit of armour of Henry VIII, from a bit later in his life, judging by the size of the pot belly on the suit.
St George's Chapel, Windsor Later in the day I attended evensong in St George’s Chapel, part of Windsor Castle, and the spiritual home of the Order of the Garter. In the nave of the chapel, each knight of the Order has a stall on which his nameplate is affixed, and most of the stalls are almost filled, with nameplates from hundreds of years of knights. St George’s Chapel is also the resting place of, among others, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
So ended a day with the royals and their history in Windsor. The next day saw travel from Oxford to London to Toronto to another Windsor, one with less regal architecture, perhaps, but people just as noble.
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