Heavenly Chocolate Orange Coffee Crème Brûlée Recipe
Crême Brulées can be a tricky affair, due to their rather difficult texture. It is hard to make a crême brulée which has that wonderful crackle as one crunches one's spoon through the hard upper crust, and then the smooth and creamy interior - one which should be well set, enough to make it a real custard as one eats it. Thankfully, to make up for this difficult problem, crême brulées have the decided advantage that they can be matched to any of a wide host of flavor ranges. Orange crême brulées, chocolate crême brulées, vanilla crême brulées, lemon crême brulées, there are enough possible varieties which can be made so as to boggle the imagination. In this case, I have been choosing to cook with a recently discovered trinity of chocolate-orange-coffee, something which I find to be a quite wonderful and pleasant mixture of sweet, fruity, rich, decadent, full-bodied, filled with a splendid complexity and depth of flavor. It always seems like a combination which wouldn't quite work, and yet voilà - it does! An elegant, sophisticated, and above all else, tasty dessert, a real delight to eat and enjoy.
This recipe is my own personal creation.
Ingredients
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 8 ounces chocolate chips
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup sugar
- 6 egg yolks
- 2 tablespoons instant coffee
- 2/3 cup Grand Marnier
Instructions
- In a medium sized saucepan, combine together the chocolate chips with the heavy cream. Melt over medium heat until the two are combined, stirring, making sure there are no remaining lumps of chocolate. Allow to rest while doing the other steps.
- In a separate mixing bowl of large size, separate the egg yolks and the egg whites, using only the egg yolks for this recipe. Add in the sugar and vanilla and beat until thick and creamy. Once this is done, add in the Grand Marnier and combine that too.
- Add in the instant coffee into the chocolate-cream mixture, and then pour part of this into the mixing bowl, with the other ingredients, perhaps around 1/4. Once this is integrated, add in the rest.
- Lay out ramekins in a large baking dish or vessel which can hold them and water. First surround the ramekins with hot water until around half of the way up, then pour the chocolate-cream mixture into the ramekins until it is most of the way up the tops, choosing ramekins of one's preferred size. I got 6 of medium size.
- Place into the oven for 60 minutes at 325 degrees F. Once they are removed, allow to cool, and then place into the refrigerator for at least a few hours.
- Prior to serving, remove from the refrigerator and cover the tops with 4 tablespoons of sugar. Use an oven torch to torch the tops until the sugar caramelizes and forms a hard top. Or place them into an oven with a broiler function on for 10 minutes, carefully making sure that they don't overcook and burn. Preferably allow to cool afterwards to make sure the interior has solidified again. I found that my sugar toppings lasted a few days, but this was done with a broiler and was somewhat overdone: be wary about the time which the sugar top will last.
© 2019 Ryan Thomas
