Cowgirl Dinner Party: The Sabetha Chronicles, Part Five

Here we will tell you how to make crème brûlée. Or, perhaps more accurately, a variation thereof.

Ours was more like crème brû-soup. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

For our final course of the Cowgirl Dinner Party we made P-Dub's Crème Brûlée (p. 208).

We started by warming a quart of heavy cream. Then we added a teaspoon of vanilla extract. This was brought to an almost-boil, then removed from the heat.

Mr. Fabuful's mother, Momma Vickie, was super sweet. Earlier that week, she had separated a plethora of egg yolks, saving them in the freezer for us. The day before we used them, she kindly moved the egg yolks to the fridge to thaw. Well, we should have taken them out of the fridge earlier because they were still quite gelatinous and/or crunchy. So, we of course thought, "Let's try adding water!" We're geniuses. Ok, maybe not.

See? A little gelatinous. A little crunchy.

We put the egg yolks in a bowl along with a good amount of sugar and began to stir. And stir, and stir, and stir. Lou and Jo took turns so as to avoid getting carpel tunnel or tendonitis.

Next we slowly tempered the egg mixture by gradually adding the warm cream mixture, continuing to stir. The crème brûlée sauce was then placed in these cute little ramekins.

The ramekins were placed on a jelly roll pan. Water was poured into the pan to keep them from burning. These were baked for approximately 40 minutes. They were cooled for several hours in the refrigerator.

When we were ready to have dessert, we sprinkled each ramekin with sugar and placed them under the broiler. That was interesting. We didn't have a hand-held torch, so it wasn't as pretty as Ree's pictures. Also, because of the water we added to the egg yolks, the dessert was more of a yogurt-consistency rather than a custard-consistency.

Our guests were kind and gracious and said it was delicious. Well, it did taste pretty good. And there were true little treats of properly-baked custard on the insides of the ramekins. We just encourage people to use their own imaginations.

Here we will leave you with some parting shots of our dinner party. Glad you could join us, even if only on the other side of the screen.

Happily full,