Lazy Sunday

It's been a nice lazy Sunday... my boyfriend K. and I had a friend over for a pancake brunch this morning, did the laundry, went to the gym, made pasta with meat sauce for dinner (one of my favorite comfort foods), and watched some television. Sometimes it's good to have a bit of time without doing too much...if I were a cat today, I'd look something like this:

Source: google.com via Nicole on Pinterest

We also got the opportunity to try out the culinary torch that K. got for the holidays on some homemade crème brûlée. K. makes amazing crème brûlée, starting with this vanilla custard recipe. Over the past several months, we'd tried a number of different ways to get the sugar crust on top without a torch; broiling just heated the custard and didn't caramelize the sugar, putting a bit of Gran Marnier on top and lighting that on fire wasn't hot enough to melt the sugar (though resulted in a nicely boozy dessert), and caramelizing the sugar in a pan beforehand made a crust that was 1/4" thick. It looks like a torch really is the best way to go! Unfortunately I didn't take pictures before the first one we made disappeared. Sidenote: this recipe also makes really, really good frozen custard. It's the same base, you just put it in an ice cream maker instead of baking it in ramekins. Amazingly decadent stuff...as might be expected from a recipe that solely consists of egg yolks, heavy cream, sugar, vanilla extract, and vanilla beans.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend and don't have anything too stressful planned for the week ahead!