Chocolate Creme Brulee: Traditions?

Who needs traditions when you can add chocolate to it? While I will happily make ice cream day in and day out, my sister is not a fan of frozen custard. I know, its embarrassing. A few weeks ago when I tried to ask her for help deciding what type of ice cream to make, she wrinkled her nose in a frown and implored I bake 1) something new, and 2) something either with chocolate or cheesecake. Setting aside my ice cream recipe for a few days, I sought out to find something chocolate or cheesecake like to bake for the family, and in particular my sister.

sorry and not well bruleed. but what can you do? 

Chocolate and cheesecake are probably the two flavors I am most terrified of making. Now, don't get me wrong, I love both chocolate and cheesecake. The problem with both flavors is that its so hard to get perfect. Bad chocolate is a recipe for boring cake, and I don't think I've advanced far enough in my baking experience to deal with cracking cheesecakes in the oven. However, what I am (or was?) ready for is a butane torch. Yup, that single use torch for creme brulee and meringue pie (the box will insist you can also use it to brulee grapefruit, but please, that's so boring).

A traditional go-getter may have tried making you know, normal vanilla bean, custardy creme brulee for his or her first attempt at burnt cream. But, given that the name I have given this blog to define my baking experiences is literally awkward, I figured, what the hell. Chocolate creme brulee is the one true burnt cream for my family and desires to burn things. Oh, and its just so fun to crack that sugar shell. Seriously, just look at these pictures.

Not to mention, I had a huge 1 kg Valrhona chocolate bar that I towed back with me from Belgium last summer that was still sitting around in the cabinet just waiting for me to get over my fears of chocolate. Sadly (or fortunately), this recipe required a laughably small amount of chocolate, so there's still quite a bit of chocolate left in the cabinet at home. Heres to hoping it doesn't dry out/seize or do that funky thing that opened chocolate does when its left sitting for too long....

Creme brulee is actually not too difficult to make. Maybe I've gotten accustomed to custards after all the custard ice creams I've been making, but the most strenuous part was probably just waiting for the custard to set. While the recipe from Williams Sonoma said 30-40 mins, my custard was still fairly jiggly and NOT set around the edges after more than an hour. My oven wasn't pretty happy about me constantly opening the door to check on the custard though, so it tended to hang out at a far lower temperature than the called for 325 F. I eventually just took it out because I really needed to pick up my brother from school, but after sitting overnight + a day, the custard seemed perfectly fine. Not really sure what happened, or how to assess brulees in the future, but there will certainly be brulees in the future. Perhaps normal vanilla bean ones!

TL;DR:

• Burning sugar is really fun. A butane torch is definitely worth the 30 dollars for just making creme brulees.
• Chocolate creme brulee is just as lovely as its vanilla counter part, but requires a surprisingly small amount of chocolate.
• Watching custard set is the new watching paint dry.