orange cauliflower, microwave cheese sauce & creme brulee

I tried the orange cauliflower. Sure enough, it tastes like white cauliflower, but it looks prettier on the plate. In the future, I'll go back to shopping by price. Also, the one I bought was just a little less crisp and the flowerettes a little less tight than they should be. I'm normally a more careful shopper.

I usually put salad dressing on hot cauliflower, but tonight I was in the mood for cheese sauce. In a microwave safe glbutt measuring cup, I put in 2 Tablespoons of butter and a heaping teaspoon of flour. I melted them together in the microwave. Then I added a scant cup of milk and about a half a cup of chunked English farmstead cheddar cheese. I nuked it until it was all hot, gave it a good stir, and it came out lump free. Perfect.

Today I got around to buying Jim's Christmas gift. (I abhor holidays, but if I've got to celebrate them, it makes no sense to me to do it on the holiday itself.) He loves gadgets so I got him one of those kitchen torches for melting sugar on creme brulee. I wasn't sure he liked it when I brought it home, but later in the evening, he was suggesting that we might make creme brulee so he must have been into the idea. I order creme brulee in restaurants all the time but have never attempted it at home. I used the recipe in Silver Palate Cookbook. The directions were easy to follow. Everything turned out as it should as far as the custard and baking in a water bath. (I love the idea of creme brulee. How could you make cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla taste bad? The recipe is a sure winner.) (Instead of using all vanilla, we made 3 ramekins, one with vanilla, one with Grand Marnier and one with cognac.)

We chilled it for several hours then got to play with the new toy. The recipe calls for brown sugar sifted on top. After several tries, all we got was burnt sugar. We carefully tapped it off and tried again with white sugar. You'd think this was easy, but I'm asking for advice. In restaurants, the sugar comes out a perfect sheet of light brown heavenly sweetness with yummy richness underneath. We've got the rich custard, now how do we get the sugar on top? Using the torch, we couldn't get it right. Brown sugar burned. White sugar formed little ugly brown lumps. We tried the broiler. Watching it every second, we still got burnt lumps. Help! Is there a trick to this?

--Lia