The Mixing Bowl: Crème brûlée by Marina Ekroos

This is the first ever “proud mama” style post that I ever written here on dessert girl. It concerns the hugely talented photographer Marina Ekroos and her new cookbook, Silmänruokaa (Visual Recipes). You may remember that a couple of years ago Marina contributed a Mixing Bowl recipe for chocolate macarons that was one of our most popular posts! Well, as it turns out, making those macarons really inspired and encouraged Marina to do more recipes and continue working on her concept of single shot recipes. For those of you who are not familiar with Marina’s work, her photographs capture the development of a recipe (ingredients, process, finished product) in a single frame, so that you get a complete recipe in one image. How cool is that? She now has an entire cookbook filled with gorgeous photos, including the macaron recipe that she created for dg, and I couldn’t be prouder! It was such a treat for me to see a dessert girl recipe in a real live book and I’m so happy to hear that Marina’s experience here was a good one. The finished product is really lovely and even though the recipes are in Finnish, I would still recommend checking it out. The photographs alone make it a great coffee table book.

To help celebrate this momentous occasion, Marina is back, sharing with us her delicious recipe for crème brûlée (see image at the top of this post), which is also featured in her book. I'm so excited that someone is finally tackling crème brûlée for this site! There is something so fun about a dessert that you have to crack open. Who doesn’t love the feeling of whacking the hard, caramelized top of a crème brûlée with a spoon? It’s such a satisfying feeling, almost as if you are excavating a cave wall, on a search for buried treasure. It’s also a great dessert for this time of year. Quite wintery and wonderful! And the perfect way to impress your friends this holiday season.

You can find the complete crème brûlée recipe after the jump. For purchasing info on the cookbook, along with information on how to buy limited edition prints from the book, click here. Thanks, Marina! ~Erin

**If you need help converting the measurements, click here for a nifty conversion calculator.


Crème brûlée (adapted from Silmänruokaa, Visual Recipes, translation by Marina Ekroos)

2–4 portions (5-inch shallow heat-proof dish).
½  vanilla pod
4 dl cream
5 egg yolks
1 dl sugar
2 tbs cane sugar

1. Heat the cream together with a split vanilla pod. Let it cool and spice up, meanwhile…

2. Separate the egg yolks.

3. Whisk the egg yolks together with sugar so that it dissolves.

4. Add cream. Do not whisk too much, to avoid unnecessary air in the mixture.

5. Pour the mix into the dishes. Heat the oven to 300F.

6. Cook the crème brûlées in a water bath (bain-marie): spread a sheet on the bottom of a casserole, then put the brûlée dishes on the sheet. Pour boiling water into the casserole, so that it surrounds the dishes. When everything is in its place, put it in the oven.

7. Observe the consistency of the puddings and make sure there is enough water throughout the cooking. Take the brûlées out from the oven when they have reached a pudding like structure. This takes between 30 and 60 minutes.

8. Let the crème brûlées rest in fridge for a minimum of three hours, preferably overnight. Just before serving spread some cane sugar on the surface and caramelize the sugar in order to create a hard layer.