crème brûlée

So about a year ago (maybe two?) my mom get me a set of ramekins and a crème brûlée cookbook. I also got a torch (from Steph?), but have yet to actually get it together enough to actually make it. Unknown to me, prior to a month ago, my mom had never had crème brûlée, because she's not generally a fan of custards. She had it at a very nice restaurant near Princeton, and it was apparently quite good. So there was pressure to make it this holiday season.

I used Alton Brown's recipe, mostly because there seemed to be very little variation among the different recipes I checked, even among the ratios of cream to egg to sugar. His had an extra step that basically involves steeping the vanilla pod in the cream for a while, and that appealed to me, so I gave it a shot. It took a few tries to get the right amount of sugar and heat for a nice top, but by the last one I had it down. One thing we did learn is that extra time to cool and set makes for a much better crème brûlée. Two hours was the suggested, I'd recommend at least overnight.

I've made another batch for christmas dessert, we'll see how it turned out, since I now have shiny new ramekins and they'll have had a full 24 hours to cool. I think we might be able to start experimenting with flavors beyond the standard vanilla after this batch.