This recipe is part of a paid partnership with Highground Organic Instant Coffee. As always, all thoughts and opinions are all my own. Thank you for supporting the brands that make Gathered At My Table possible!

The first time that I tasted a pot de creme was the first time that I realized that I could become a pastry chef. Back in college, while I spent my days in a classroom studying to be a teacher, my cousin Joey was attending culinary school across town. (Side note: He is now a very fancy executive chef at a very fancy restaurant and resort and his food is actual artwork. It’s amazing.) Anyway, Joey would stage in the afternoons and evenings at a upscale restaurant in town which meant that we would often pop in said restaurant for deeply discounted (read: free) fancy food experiences. We would sit at a little table near the open kitchen and eat whatever the kitchen sent out to us. At the end of our first dining experience, the pastry chef sent out a sampler of all of the desserts on the menu featuring a chocolate pot de creme served with toasted brioche sticks for dipping. I about lost my mind. The custard was rich and creamy. The brioche was so perfectly toasted, the outsides were crispy and the inside was as soft as a pillow. It was the first dessert that my 19-year-old self saw artistry in, something more precise and creative than the cookies and brownies I’d been living on my whole life. It took me another seven years to actually make the career change into pastry, but it all began with that little pot de creme.

what is a pot de creme?

Pot de creme (literally translated to pot of cream) falls into the baked custards family of pastry. It shares similarities with many of it’s custard cousins— it’s baked in a water bath, uses eggs as the primary setting agent, can be flavored in many different ways. Pots de creme are often lumped in with puddings, which is not technically accurate. While the consistency is very similar to a pudding, a pot de creme only uses eggs as it’s thickener/setting agent, while pudding traditionally employs some sort of starch, like flour or cornstarch, to aid in thickening.

While they do take a bit of time to make, pots de creme are fairly hands-off. A simple, egg based custard is made (very similar in process to a creme anglaise sauce) by heating milk and cream and then tempering in egg yolks and sugar. The hot cream is then poured into jars or ramekins and baked at a very low temperature in a water bath until set. The custards then cool to room temperature and are chilled for at least 6 hours and served cold (preferably with perfectly toasted brioche).

dalgona coffee

I know that I’m close to a year late on this whole Dalgona coffee trend, but I’m here! That’s all that matters. Dalgona coffee is a whipped coffee that got it’s start in South Korea and took over our Instagram feeds last spring. (Michele at Hummingbird High has a very in depth look at Dalgona coffee over on her blog.) It’s so simple to make and adds a really fun texture to the pot de creme. Highground Instant Coffee, hot water, and sugar are whipped using an electric mixer until it creates a fluffy, aerated coffee that holds it’s shape and texture when added to milk or scooped on top of pots de creme. It’s like having a latte and dessert at the same time.

a note on toasted sugar

The toasted sugar in this recipe is completely optional, but it is a fun little pastry chef trick for adding depth and flavor to otherwise fairly simple and straightforward desserts. The recipe below makes more toasted sugar than is needed for this recipe (it is very difficult to toast small amounts of sugar without making oven caramel, which is not something we want), but you can store the cooled sugar in a sealed container and bake with it just like you would regular granulated sugar. If you decide to skip the toasted sugar in this recipe, just use granulated sugar in its place.