CREME BRULEE

Well, as always, December is flying by and I realized yesterday morning that, yet again, I will have blown through another Holiday Season without making Crème Brulee.  Our schedule is tight and Crème Brulee is just not going to fit in.

It seems simple enough: Crème Brulee requires only five ingredients...at least that version touted by Alton Brown of The Food Network.  He simply asks for:

 One quart of heavy cream

One vanilla bean, split and scraped

One cup of vanilla sugar

Six large egg yolks 

Two quarts of hot water, and

Three Hours and Thirty Minutes of My Life

And, therein, lies the problem. 

If you have to google "vanilla sugar", as I was forced to do, you will be told to bury two vanilla beans in one pound of granulated sugar for a week or so, at which point you dig the beans back out and, I'm assuming, immediately float off into an absolute ecstasy of olfactory delight because nothing smells better than vanilla--and when it's combined with sugar it must be pure heaven.  Unfortunately, that one little ingredient has lengthened our time frame by the twenty minutes it took to figure out what it was, and our prep time has been moved up by one week. 

In addition to timing, the other factor that holds me back from taking on Crème Brulee is that I lack a certain amount of finesse in the kitchen, and if the recipe is just the slightest bit arbitrary, I am lost.  A few lines into Alton's Crème Brulee recipe and I learn that I am to bake little ramekins (add those to the shopping list) of Crème Brulee until they are "set."  Oh, Alton?  What exactly would set mean?  Oh--set means: "...set, but still trembling in the center..."  Oh... sorry, but I am morally opposed to placing anything that is still trembling into my oven, let alone lift it back out again. 

So, yes, there will be no Crème Brulee at my house this year.  I think I'm most sad about the fact that I still have no excuse to purchase the mini propane torch designed to carmelize some of that vanilla sugar I should have been making last week.  

But, I think I'm most glad that I will have three hours and thirty minutes more to shop and wrap for those little Midwest Munchkins I'm going to visit in another week.

Amen....