French Friday with Dorie: Crème Brûlée

I have been looking forward to making crème brûlée for the longest time and was excited when it came up for the December schedule for French Fridays with Dorie. It's been such a crazy week getting ready for Christmas and working though, that I didn't have time to make it until this morning. Since this was my first time making crème brûlée, I decided to skip the jam preserves in the recipe which sounds like a great twist, but I wanted the traditional version. After tweeting with Mardi and Cher last weekend I learned that the temperature of 200 degrees in the recipe was too low thanks to Mardi's research (Thank you, Mardi!), and so I set my oven for 250 degrees and checked the crème brûlées after 60 minutes and they looked like they were almost set, but I left them in there another 10 minutes to make sure.

After they cooled, I put them in the refrigerator to chill and left them there for most of the day until we got home from doing some last minute shopping tonight. I had to experiment with a couple of them though because I have never used the torch. The first one I used brown sugar and it burned in quite a few places, the second one I used raw sugar and John got out his larger torch which was much easier for me to handle and control than the smaller torch. We each had a taste test and it was declared a winner! The custard is so creamy and combined with the crackled sugar is so very delicious. 

It is almost 10:00 at night and we haven't eaten dinner yet (my daughter is making dinner so I am not complaining). The remaining crème brûlées will be our midnight dessert. My post is so late, but I can't wait to see what the rest of the French Friday with Dorie group thought of the recipe.

Happy Holidays, everyone!