Tuesdays With Dorie ~ Vanilla and Cinnamon Sugar Cup Custard

Today's Tuesdays with Dorierecipe was getting a lot of negative feedback on the questions page of the group. Dorie, hide your eyes. I'm guessing most of the custard haters would not like most custards made by anyone. Custard is a whole entity of it's own. You either like it or you don't. I would not have chosen this recipe if I was just flipping through my baking book. I tend to make the same kinds of things over and over. I get new recipe books and try the same kinds of things. Were it not for The Way the Cookie Crumbles choosing this recipe for this week's rotation, I probably would not have ever ventured into the custard world either.

I had a bout of bad luck last week with 4 tries at different lemon custards. My husband and I decided it was the lemons. They were from various friends and neighbors lemon trees. One tree, I think, made stinker lemons. My dear, sweet husband has been singing "Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but that fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat." to me all week. The first time he came to me and asked me how the song went. He knew the answer and it took me a second. But when I sang it back to him, I knew what he was saying.

So I did not try this recipe with lemons. Dorie sometimes puts in a playing around section that gives you ideas how to do different things with the recipe. I jumped on the playing around. She has a vanilla version. I have some lovely homemade vanilla that I adore so much I could just drink it straight. (Kat has a tutorial for homemade vanilla she needs to post here. I made it a year before she did, but she typed up a tutorial and made hers nice and pretty.) I douse everything with it. I figured I would give it a go. The directions say you can even steep the milk with a vanilla bean. I tried and tried to pull a vanilla bean out of my bottle, but it is a tall vodka bottle. I contemplated drinking the vodka to get to the beans, but then I wouldn't have any vanilla left. Not a good thing. So I just doused the milk with some vanilla...lots of vanilla. As I was whipping up the eggs, I thought it would be really good with cinnamon. So I added a little cinnamon to it too. I didn't put too much effort into it because of all the failures I was reading about.

Just now after dinner, I pulled it out of the fridge. I took out a scoop. It was yummy! Was it all the vodka vanilla? Who is to say for sure. But the cinnamon and vanilla were a nice way to go. A while back I made some rice pudding. I had big hopes for it. It was good. But this was better than that. If I want something like that, I will use this recipe with my changes again.


Anjeanette