I used aspects from a few different recipes to create my own delicious version. Recipes from Food and Wine magazine, Gourmet's Best Desserts, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Claire Robinson's show on the Food Network, Five Ingredient Fix, inspired me to come up with this recipe. It's super easy and very rewarding in the end. My version uses dark chocolate and more sugar to sweeten it up a bit more. These two things are the variables in this recipe equation. You may change them to suit your liking. Use more or less sugar if you like. Change the type of chocolate. One recipe I saw used Mexican chocolate. Once you have the basic formula down you can then get creative with it! Cooking should be fun and recipes should be suggestive and helpful guidelines, not a restrictive set of rules.
Dark Chocolate Pot de Crème
Phoebe Meier
Yield 8 or 9 servings. The smaller size of cup the better. These are rich! Trust me. Look for cups the size of shot glasses or espresso cups.
1½ cups whole milk
½ cup heavy cream
6 large egg yolks*
12 oz. chopped dark chocolate
¾ cup sugar
In a sauce pan bring milk and cream to a simmer. Add sugar and whisk. Beat egg yolks in a bowl. Whisk ½ cup of hot milk, cream and sugar mixture into the beaten egg yolks. This tempers them (slowly increases the temperature of the egg yolks). If you were to add all the yolks to the hot mixture at once you would cook them, basically creating scrambled eggs. After you have tempered the egg yolks with ½ cup of the hot mixture you can then whisk that in with the remaining hot mixture. This is now a custard! Cook this custard over moderate heat until thickened (about 2 minutes), whisking constantly. Add the chopped chocolate and remove from heat. Stir until the chocolate is melted. Pour evenly into dishes and let the little pot de crèmes chill and set up for at least 6 hours. They may be refrigerated for about 3 days.
*Always save your leftover egg whites for an omelet the next day or possibly an egg white souffle
Cherry Whip
Claire Robinson- Five Ingredient Fix
½ cup heavy cream
1 tsp. sugar
¼ cup cherry preserves at room temperature
If you love fresh whipped cream as much as I do, you might want to just go ahead and double this recipe. However, this amount will be sufficient for those of us that were blessed with having a minimal amount of self restriction and consider blatant gluttony a negative thing. This is another easy peasy. Just pour the whipped cream in a mixer and mix on high.You may whisk by hand if you don't have a mixer, but this will take much longer. Sprinkle the sugar in once the cream begins to thicken. Mix until soft "peaks" form. Test by dabbing the cream in the center with the mixer and pull up and out. If the dab of cream holds its shape in the air this is considered a "peak." Do not over mix or the whipped cream becomes too stiff. We want soft peaks, not stiff peaks. Give the cherry preserves a quick mixing with a spoon so they are less stiff and more like liquid. Gently fold these into the whipped cream. DO NOT MIX INTO. They do not need to be fully incorporated into the whipped cream, as the more you mix the less fluffy the whipped cream will become. Simply top each pot de crème with a sizable dab of the cherry whipped cream and serve. What are you waiting for? EAT!
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