Coffee-Cardamom Pot de Creme

Sounds fabulous! We have one little chicken, who lays little eggs - it makes producing 1/2 an egg possible!

Lucky you having a chicken! If you are interested in making this, turns out Serious Eats has the recipe. <a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/01/baking-with-dorie-daniel-bouluds-coffee-cardamom-pots-de-creme-recipe.html">http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/01/baking-with-dorie-daniel-bouluds-coffee-cardamom-pots-de-creme-recipe.html</a> I plan to try this again making a full recipe, but I do think that it makes sense to make the caramel first, add the cream, then add the coarsely ground coffee and cardamom and infuse for 20 minutes or so. I think the coffee and cardamom added to the sugar you are trying to caramelize just unnecessarily complicates matters. And you run the risk of having a burnt coffee-cardamom flavor rather than a coffee-cardamom flavor. Although, yes, I do realize that Daniel Boulud knows more about this than I do and must have his reasons.

Thanks for that link - so interesting that it was from Dorie Greenspan, doing Daniel Boulud's recipe. The comments were also interesting - and brought up a question - green or black cardamom? I think my pods are green, and this goes on the list for a calorie extravagant dessert! And yes, aj, having chickens is amazing. They not only give me the best tasting eggs ever, they eat up the leftovers that languish in the refrigerator - easing my guilt about food waste!

Dorie is the co-author on the Daniel Boulud cookbook. I was happy to see in the comments on the recipe that other home cooks had a little trouble with caramelizing the sugar with the coffee and cardamom in there. By the way -- she also has you put the boiling water in the pan after it is in the oven -- which I think is more of a pain than it needs to be -- I pour the water in and then pop it in the oven -- I cannot imagine that it makes a difference.