[Inez] Baking day, part two.

I've been eyeing these chocolate-raspberry pots de creme that I saw on Tastespotting for a couple weeks now, but I haven't had time to make them. Until Thursday! After the scones, and after practice, I made these delicious little chocolate custards. Photos are courtesy of Ella, because I didn't feel like it. The colors are a little icky because the pictures were taken at night with artificial light. Sorry.


I liked this recipe at sight, because it's a custard except that instead of stirring the pudding over a low heat with a flat-bottomed whisk for about 7 hours, you mix everything together and pop them in the oven! My kind of pudding.

This is a recipe I got offline, but then I had to convert it to regular measurements (it was in grams -- grams of egg yolk? What??).


Ingredients:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 vanilla bean, split and seeded (or if you're like me and have never even seen a vanilla bean, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract will do just fine)
• 2 T + 2 t sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 6 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• raspberries (fresh or frozen)

Preheat oven to 300 F.

Separate your whites and yolks (anyone have suggestions for what to do with 4 egg whites? Besides get a puppy and feed them to it, that is).


Then CHOP your chocolate. (I forgot to do this, and it made the next step a pain in the butt.)


Bring milk, cream, vanilla, and half of the sugar to a boil. Pour this over the CHOPPED chocolate, and stir until chocolate is melted.


(On the other hand, because I forgot to chop the chocolate it didn't mix very well, which meant that there were little bits of straight up chocolate in the pudding, which I kind of liked.)


Whisk yolks and the other half of the sugar. (I was using unsweetened bakers chocolate, so I added a lot of sugar to the egg yolks...)


Place some raspberries (forget less is more -- more is more!) into ramekins.


Then pour custard over the raspberries. (I have 4 4-oz ramekins, and that wasn't enough. I ended up using the 4 ramekins plus 2 mugs which each had a bit more than 4 oz in them. 4 oz is a good serving size, though.)


Place the ramekins on a baking sheet, and pour water onto the sheet.


Bake until the center is set (about 40 minutes).


Serve warm (or hot, if you're as impatient as me). I recommend watching Aladdin while you eat these. That's what Ella and I did, and it was great.