I'm just going to ruin the ending for you and tell you that this was a terrible idea.
Oh, and also we bought chocolate bits, so there was no way to forget to chop the chocolate.
What you see above is the egg yolks with the blended blackberries and raspberries. It's kind of pretty, right? Pretty, but lethal to pots de creme everywhere. See, the texture turned out really grainy and weird, and the custard never quite set. My guess is that all the juice from the berries added way too much liquid to the recipe, not to mention way too much sugar. These babies were really sweet.
We used the exact same recipe as Ella and I used before, so I won't post it again. The only difference was that rather than putting whole raspberries in the bottom of the ramekin before pouring on the custard, we blended them and added them directly to the custard itself. Thus I can safely say that the only culprit for the weird texture can possibly be the blended berries.
Based on this failed experiment, I can make some recommendations.
First of all, if adding much fruit to a custard, use some unsweetened and some bittersweet chocolate, rather than all bittersweet.
Second of all, if you insist on blending fruit and then adding it to a custrd recipe, please strain off the juice or boil it down or something beforehand. Also, use a Vitamix if you have it, to pulvurize those little seeds. Getting berry seeds stuck in your teeth while eating custard really kind of sucks.
But really, if you want flavored pots de creme, I'd recommend adding a little bit of liqueur or extract or something highly concentrated like that. That way you can control just exactly how much liquid you're adding to the recipe. I think you'll be much more successful this way.
Elise and I are going to try to make time to re-do the pots de creme, only this time I suspect they will just be chocolate.
Hi Inez and Elise, I think you're right about the fruit addeing too much liquid to the pots o' creme. It might also be taht some fruit is acidic, so on top of the acidity of the extra sugar, the acidity of the fruit itself might have messed it up. Like you know how you can't make jello with pineapple or real lemon or lime, because it's too acidic and won't set up? Ok, this is just a guess. I know berries aren't as acidic as pineapple or citris... Ruby
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