We made it! Sort of… we’ve rolled through, in some form or another, to the other side of Thanksgiving. Some of us are a little worse for the wear (did I really need that 4th slice of pecan pie?) but we’re here. And it’s finally time for Christmas! I refuse to start celebrating before December, but as soon as the first rolls around, you better believe the lights up, the carols are playing, and my oven is working overtime while I go overboard with my holiday baking excitement. After the fam departed sunny Los Angeles, taking our good weather with them, and I managed to finally get all my pots and pans tucked back in their cabinets (as mamacita had borrowed my entire kitchen to make her outstanding Thanksgiving meal) all I wanted was some hot cocoa and some light, creamy, not-too-sweet tasty goodness. You know, to slowly come down from the sugar high I’d been experiencing for the past week. To fill the sad, pie-less void in which they left me, I decided that it was the perfect time to try out a little pot de creme recipe I found on saveur.com. Many years ago, I’d attempted a simple chocolate pot de creme, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the grainiest, soupiest, grossest thing I’ve ever attempted to bake. Ever. So I went into this cautiously optimistic that my skills may have improved in the past few years, and even if these maple pot de cremes turned out terribly, I could drown my sorrows in a mug of rich, dark peppermint hot cocoa.

Luckily, all went better than expected! It started out with some eggs:

Followed simply by some brown sugar, cream, and maple syrup. It’s so hard to go wrong with all your ingredients are so right

Whip it all together, pour it into a couple ramekins, add some boiling water to your roasting pan and then pop those suckers in the oven for a little over an hour! (Depending on your oven – mine always takes longer than recipes state, I’ve just grown accustomed to adding on a couple minutes here and there)

Like the planning genius that I am, I completely forgot to get the cooling racks from underneath the oven before turning it up to 350 for over an hour. So makeshift cooling racks happened instead

Whip up a little fresh cream with a dash of vanilla and voila! Tasty noms!

Never the wrong call to bring in to the office either… especially on the Monday after a holiday when no one really wants to be back at work, and everyone’s still kind of in a turkey coma. So easy, so tasty!