Thursday, May 28, 2009
Cheesemaking 101
Monday, May 25, 2009
Baked Caramel Egg Custard
Today's recipe is an old fashioned baked caramel custard. It is sublime. Eggy, creamy, sweet with a light caramel sauce on the bottom and fairly easy to make. The secret to a very creamy custard is to cook it in a bain marie, or water bath. This just means to put the cooking vessel, in my case a casserole dish, in a larger pan and surround the casserole dish with water about half way up. This is then baked at a low temperature so as not to curdle the delicate mixture.
After it is thoroughly cooled, you just scoop out the custard into individual serving dishes and then spoon the wonderful, caramel syrup over the custard. Enjoy!
Baked Caramel Egg Custard
3 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
3 cups very hot milk
1/2 cup sugar for caramel
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a heavy frying pan put 1/2 cup sugar over medium high and swirl sugar around until it turns liquid. Watch very carefully and swirl often or the caramel will burn and be bitter and unusable. Pour this caramel sauce into the bottom of a 3 quart casserole dish sprayed with vegetable spray and set aside. The caramel will harden but that's okay, after baking it turns liquid again. Heat the milk in a saucepan until very hot but not boiling. In a large bowl, beat the eggs, sugar and salt together until combined. Slowly pour the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly, until combined then add vanilla. Pour the custard mixture into the prepared casserole dish. Place the dish into a larger pan, put in oven then pour hot water around the casserole to fill up to half the sides of the dish. Cook for 50 minutes until custard is totally set but still somewhat jiggly. Take out of bain marie and set aside to cool for an hour then put in refrigerator for at least 4 hours before serving.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
A Healthy Sundae
I chose to make my own granola recently as The Husband enjoys it very much and the packaged stuff never has all the things he likes and it is really expensive as far as cereal goes. So off to LifeSource I trotted and I was able to buy the exact quantities of the various ingredients in their bulk bins at a very reasonable cost.
Putting the granola together is ever so simple. Just throw everything in a big bowl, give it a very thorough stir and then spread it out on a parchment lined tray and bake. The quantities in this recipe makes about 7 cups of fresh, delicious granola. I choose to eat my granola as part of a yummy sundae which includes honey, granola and non-fat plain yogurt topped with fresh fruit.Granola
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Asian Noodle Soup with Chicken and Snow Peas
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Key Lime Pie-O-My
Friday, May 8, 2009
Baking with Dorie Greenspan
I am not going to post the recipe but instead suggest that anyone interested in a very thorough and easy to follow cookbook on baking, run to your nearest bookstore or keyboard and purchase Dorie's book immediately. You'll be glad you did.