YES! Do You Have A Blowtorch Already?
My response to the above question, as asked by my beloved little brother, was, “I said soufflé not brûlée.” Despite the initial disappointment in not getting to play with fire in my kitchen last night, both Robby and Scott were more than willing to tackle the soufflé experiment with me. For that, I will be eternally grateful. I don’t care WHAT the author of this recipe says… one person cannot tackle this recipe alone. Admittedly this was a first for any of us, but it took us an hour and a half and most of my dishes from start to first bite. (Oh, but what a first bite it was! Mmmmmmm!)
Several weeks ago, I found a recipe on CNN’s Eatocracy for a chocolate soufflé. You can read my recipe write-up on my blog right here.
After reading the recipe, I knew I would have to try it. Just looking at the pictures reminded me so much of one of my most favorite places in the world, CIRCO in Las Vegas. It’s this
wonderful little restaurant in the Bellagio hotel where we like to have dessert. They have the best soufflés!!! Anyway, back to my story…
After a delicious dinner of mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts and herbed pork loin, we decided to try out this recipe. Hilarity ensued, as did a bit of chaos, but ultimately we baked together as a team quite well. Here’s a picture of my partners in crime:
Our first step was to butter and sugar our ramekins. The recipe makes six soufflés. There were only three of us, we only had four ramekins, and we were afraid to try to cut down this recipe for our first go-round with it, so we buttered and sugared our four ramekins and just had leftover soufflé filling when it was all said and done.
After setting our ramekins off to the side, Scott started on the chocolate mixture…
…while Robby and I started cracking eggs. This recipe calls for SIXTEEN egg whites! I had bought eighteen eggs so we had a few OOPS! eggs if we needed them, but I’m proud to say that Robby and I cracked sixteen eggs and had sixteen perfect egg whites in a bowl when we were finished. Go team!
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Scott had to sift the cocoa powder into the simple syrup he made (pictured above the egg whites), and let’s just say that perhaps using a “sifter” that’s bigger than your bowl isn’t necessarily the best way to go about things. There was a lot of cocoa on the counter when he was finished, so he and Robby sprinkled a bit more cocoa from the can into the syrup and called it good.
While Scott was working on the chocolate mixture, Robby and I beat our egg whites.
He’s not actually licking the spatula in that picture…I don’t think. In retrospect, we should have waited for Scotty to finish making and cooling his chocolate mixture before beating our egg whites. They sat for a very long time before we folded them in to the chocolate mixture, and we think they lost some of the air we had whipped into them. Oh, well… live and learn!
Naturally I forgot to take pictures of the absolute mess I made trying to put the soufflé mixture into the ramekins. According to the directions, you’re supposed to dome the tops of the soufflés before baking them. That’s a messy, messy step, y’all. (I’m channeling my inner Paula, y’all.) I think it might have worked better had the egg whites not sat out for so long. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture, but if you look at the recipe on CNN, the original chef did take a picture so you’ll at least know what ours kind of looked like.
We stuck the soufflés in the oven, set the timer for twelve minutes (the directions said 15-20 but we were really afraid of an explosion or something in the oven so we thought we’d better check on them before that), and got to work on the chocolate sauce and crème chantilly, which is just a fancy name for whipped cream I’ve learned. Scott made the chocolate sauce:
Robby and I made the whipped cream, I mean crème chantilly. I, uh, got a little heavy-handed with the vanilla so we ended up having to make it to taste, adding more cream and sugar until the right flavor was there. It was delicious, and once again, I forgot to take a picture of it. The oven timer buzzed at twelve minutes and we looked through the glass on the oven door. To our great delight, our soufflés were rising!! We hadn’t failed… at least at that part. HA! We let them cook for a total of about eighteen minutes. We decided later that twenty to twenty-two minutes would be ideal to get the proper consistency all the way though the dessert. Oh, well. We were really afraid of overcooking them. When we took them out of the oven, we had this:
Then we pricked the tops with a fork and Scott added the chocolate sauce:
Then we added the crème chantilly to the tops:
And then we added some berries to the guys’ (I don’t like raspberries):
Aren’t they pretty?!?!?! The soufflé there on the right had a small hole in the side, so the chocolate sauce kind of pooled around the bottom as well as on the inside. It looked really pretty, even though it was kind of hard to clean. Finally, it was the big test: the first bites. WOW! They tasted even better than they looked. Seriously. All three of us were super-impressed with our talents.
Scott and I were a bit more refined so we don’t have fun eating pictures. HA! Okay, not really. But I snapped a picture of Robby trying to drink the last bits of his soufflé because it was funny. After we three did everything but lick our ramekins, I asked the guys what they thought of the whole ordeal. Scott said it was fun and delicious. Robby’s response? “I want to go back to Vegas now!!!!!!” Me, too, Paperclip… me, too!