Broiled Berries + Cream Recipe

I've never used a broiler. I always just assumed it was the bottom drawer my oven, where I store all my cookie sheets and a miscellaneous skillet or two--I assumed it was very hot-and that it was only to be used when cooking huge slabs of meat.

How wrong I was.

Broiled Berries + Cream. The recipe itself was very simple, and I'll say right up front-it was delicious. It also seemed to lend itself to all sorts of variations in the future (different types of berries, different serving ideas, etc). This one is a keeper.

You fill up a few ramekins with fresh, juicy (room temperature) strawberries and raspberries. Unfortunately a few of the raspberries had a bit of a mold issue, so these were heavy on the strawberry side, sprinkle a bit of raspberry liquor on top (which I didn't have on hand,so I used apricot brandy).

Whip up some cream, add egg yolks, and powdered sugar, and a dash of vanilla. Whip again, and spoon a bit of the cream over each ramekin-I put enough cream on each, so that you couldn't see the berries any more.

The recipe says to put the ramekins in the regular oven for a few minutes, and then put them in the broiler until the tops are golden.

I popped the ramekins in the oven, left them there for a few, then nearly burn my fingertips off moving the ramekins down into the drawer. Turn off the oven, turn on the broiler. A couple minutes into this I realize an eerie almost fluorescent glow coming out of the oven, so I open it, and see what looks like an industrial grade blowtorch shooting short stubby flames all along the roof of the oven.

Must be the broiler in there. duh. So I move the ramekins back up and into the (real) oven-broiler. Now it only took about one minute for the tops of cream to look like a perfectly golden marshmallow. I think I had the rack too high. Next time I will put them on the lowest rack possible.

Fast, beautiful, elegant, and tasty. The Broiled Berries + Cream were a hit.

To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!

- The Cuisine of California, page 240

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