Creme Brûlée is one of those desserts that feels quite fancy yet it’s so simple. Personally, I’ve also been a little intimidated by this dessert; you’ve got to do a water bath and torch the top. It just seemed like there’s a lot that could go wrong. Nonetheless, I wanted a simple but elegant naturally gluten free dessert for a little girls night recently so I decided it was time to try this dessert.

I used an Alton Brown recipe a month or so ago in my Soft Pretzel post so here’s another classic from him! It really is quite simple so I didn’t have any issues following the instructions. I could not find vanilla sugar anywhere so I just used 2 vanilla bean pods instead of one. I left these in the oven for the full 45 minutes because when I pulled them out at 40 minutes they felt super jiggly. They were still pretty jiggly when I pulled them out but I’ve heard it’s better to take these out a little early than leave them in there too long. Everyone’s oven will differ but as Alton says, watch for it to tremble a bit so if I make this again I’ll probably leave it a few more minutes just so it sets up a little more.

As an aside, I bought ramekins because I wasn’t sure if the ones we had were big enough but got home and realized the ones I bought were not oven safe. If you have to go out and buy some ramekins be sure to make sure they’re oven safe and only use oven safe ramekins for this recipe to avoid any hazardous situations.

I pulled these out of the fridge 30 minutes before torching as directed. I kind of eyed the sugar on top since we only ate four of these and it makes six but I juts made sure there was a nice covering of sugar on each one. The torching process was a lot of fun and I just made sure to rotate while torching (be mindful that the dish gets hot if you’re physically touching the ramekin). It maybe took a minute for each ramekin but just keep an eye on things and torch any plain sugar that hasn’t been touched but don’t overdo it as you can burn it. I love that this is a dessert you can make ahead of time and then we had a lot of fun watching the torching process!

Recipe Used: Alton Brown