okay, so months and months ago, i was at crate and barrel with emily, and i saw these beautiful white scalloped dessert dishes. and i said to emily "can i justify buying those?" and she said "yes! of course you can!" like a good little enabler. but it took me months to figure out what to make with them, because they are rather deep. i thought they might be best with some type of mousse, but what exactly to do...then, my bon appetit magazine had a recipe for a chocolate souffle in it. and though i have always heard that souffles are super complicated, and if you dont time things exactly perfectly, they will fall, and blahblahblahsohardetc. but this recipe claimed to be so easy even a caveman could do it! okay not really but i saw that commercial recently. so i figured, these dishes were the perfect thing to make the souffle in! and it mostly turned out simply - i totally miscalculated the additional cooking time needed, because i was using dishes that hold much more souffle than the recipe called for (who wants only 3/4 a cup of souffle?) but luckily they didnt fall despite coming out of the oven for a minute before they were fully done. so souffle! mmm a tasty dessert choice! but emily and bryan had also given me a bottle of their beer, entropy, so my parents could try it, and entropy goes best with vanilla...so i felt i needed something vanilla to go with it.
i considered a flan, after emily's delicious one a few weeks ago, but i had the fact that you have to turn them upsidedown on a plate for presentation. yes, i understand the whole presentation thing, and the caramel and how flan works, i know, i know, but as you can see, i like to present things in a pretty way. i also decided against creme brulee, because i dont have a torch, and yes, i know that you can make it under the broiler but it isnt the same and dont try to tell me it is. so i thought maybe a sauce to go on it! enter: the creme anglaise. a delicious, delicious sauce. made all the better because i bought a real vanilla bean!
real vanilla bean really makes all the difference, i think. i will have to use one each time i make a real vanilla dessert. the thing is though...they never tell you how you're supposed to use the vanilla bean, in recipes. you just sort of read in recipes "scrape the seeds from the pod" but you never know what it actually looks like. so when i first tried to open the vanilla bean...i had absolutely no idea how. how do you split a vanilla bean? how? how do you scrape tiny little seeds that keep getting all over your hands? well, i found instructions online, successfully scraped out tons of little seeds, and made a delicious creme anglaise (and had very delicious smelling hands after, too).
ended with some delicious, fresh strawberries, to add a little sweetness to round out the dessert. perfect! i had one extra souffle...and after chillin for a bit after baking, it fell! looks so sads...
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