Recipe testing for new dessert bar--it's a tough life...

Our new dessert cafe, called the Après Dessert Bar at Generous Servings, is opening in a month, and we've been testing recipes like crazy. It's been surprisingly difficult in some cases. For example, I found an interesting recipe for bitter orange crème caramel that I decided to try. Crème caramel is the same thing as flan: a baked custard with a caramelized sugar sauce on the bottom, which is turned out of the ramekin when it's served. It's a very simple, classic dessert, with only four ingredients: eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla. The trick is to get the texture right, because eggs curdle if they're heated too vigorously, so it's necessary to bake the custards at a low temperature and in a water bath to protect the eggs from the heat. You also have to know when to take it out of the oven, since the custard will keep cooking after it's removed, so you have to be confident and take it out when it's still very loose. I've made crème caramel lots of times, and my only problem has been that I think it's kind of boring, but I figured this bitter orange version might be more interesting. I boiled down some orange juice and added it to a basic crème caramel recipe, put the custards in a low oven, and came back to check them an hour later. What I saw was enough to permanently traumatize me. The custards were completely runny, totally curdled, had lost a lot of their volume to evaporation, and had a disgusting orange liquid floating around, like a bottle of milk that rolled under your seat and was left in your car for two weeks in the summer. They were the ugliest thing I have ever made.

I blamed the recipe, and went back to my recipe for plain crème caramel from cooking school. Same problems. I tried some other published recipes, and made some tweaks to the oven temperature, but I could barely produce anything edible, much less presentable. It turns out that it's really hard to make crème caramel at high altitude, although I have never heard anyone mention that (which might cast some doubt on my abilities, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it). I did a lot of research and only found a few minor notes about altitude issues, but I guess maybe crème caramel is enough of a dinosaur recipe that most people just don't try it any more, so no one is talking about how it is a complete disaster at high altitude.

After witnessing about ten failed attempts, Jill had the idea of contacting someone we know who went to cooking school in Boulder, and we got a high altitude recipe from him, which turned out to be a completely different recipe. It's not even technically crème caramel, but more of a hybrid between crème caramel and crème brûlée (which is a richer custard made with egg yolks and cream, instead of whole eggs and milk). The egg yolks help it set a lot faster (before it completely evaporates), and the baking temperatures and times are totally different. After making that recipe with minor variations at least eight times (even the caramel part doesn't work right up here, so I had to invent my own caramel recipe), I am happy to report that I can make a really good crème caramel. In the process of working on it, I've come to have a much greater appreciation for this dessert--it still wouldn't be my first choice at a restaurant, but it does have a certain purist appeal. I even tried making it with a real vanilla bean and we didn't like it as much as the version made with vanilla extract, so I decided not to tamper with the flavoring at all, and let the texture do the talking.

Another recipe that was really tricky was homemade graham crackers, which we need for our Make-Your-Own S'Mores dessert. It turns out that it's hard to capture the essence of a graham cracker, and it's probably harder at high altitude, although I never tried at sea level, so I can't compare. A few months ago I went to dinner at a fancy restaurant that has a well-known pastry chef, and I got a dessert that had a not-good homemade graham cracker in it, so I feel even more triumphant now that I've figured it out. If anyone from Rioja would like to contact me, I'd be happy to share my recipe, even though you didn't even respond to my application to be an assistant pastry chef for you when I first moved out here and needed a temporary job. No hard feelings, but my graham crackers are better than yours.

Other recipes have been much more cooperative, and for the past few weeks we've been focusing on garnishes and plating. Travis and I have been scouring magazines for presentation ideas, and we got a bulletin board to put up pictures and brainstorm for future recipes. There are notes like "USE CARDAMOM!" and "avocado in dessert?", plus lots of pages torn from my extensive cooking magazine collection. It's fun to have all our creative juices flowing, and we can't wait to unveil the results of our efforts next month!