Sorry Good Stuff Maple followers. When it’s the in-between market season I travel a lot. I just got back to Calgary from a voluntourism event with my sisters and my aunt. We spent a little over a week in Mexico building a school.
I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the best experiences of my life.
It was so wonderful that I was a little down in the dumps when I got home. What is a person to do when they are feeling sad and wishing they were back on vacation? They make maple creme brulee, of course.
Just an FYI, this is not a recipe that you should just whip up before dinner. It is a make the night before and let chill in the fridge overnight.
Ingredients
4 Cups Heavy Cream
1/2 Cup Dark Maple Syrup
7 Egg Yolks
2 Tbs. Brown Sugar
2 Ounces of Bourbon
Maple Sugar (or brown, or white sugar) to cover ramekins
Large Baking Dish
6 Ramekins
Method
Preheat your oven to 300°F. There’s a reason this is the first step, so your oven gets nice and warm while you’re making the filling.
Go find a nice heavy bottomed saucepan and whisk together heavy cream and maple syrup really briskly.
Cook over medium-low heat, not stirring, until a thin skin forms on top of the cream. Do Not Let It Simmer!
Get your whisk back out and whisk together the yolks, sugar and bourbon. Toss a little bit of salt into the mixture. Just a punch.
Is your cream hot and steamy? Good, now that it is hot and while whisking egg yolks, add the cream a little bit at a time. Go slow and steady, it wins the race.
Use a sieve to strain your mixture to ensure any cooked eggy bits dont wind up in your smooth and silken custard.
Pop your custard-y filling back into your pot and cook low and slow. STIR CONSTANTLY. In theory, your mixture should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Place your ramekins in that nifty big baking dish that was mentioned way up there in the ingredients. Fill the dish with boiling waters so that it goes about half of the way up the dishes.
Pour the custard into each of the ramekin and bake for 40ish minutes. You want it to be firm but bouncy.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before placing in the refrigerator to set overnight.
When you are ready to present your wonderful dessert, sprinkle about ½ teaspoon of sugar over each crème, caramelize either using a blowtorch or under the broiler of the oven.
good stuff maple 