Flán de Leche

The semester is coming to a close and this is the last blog post so, I want to end it off on a sweet note! This recipe is for the sweet tooth, Flán de Leche Condensada.

Flán de leche Condensada is a custard cake with a caramel topping. It is a traditional dessert that is primarily made for the holidays, especially Christmas.

The flán recipe can be traced back to Ancient Rome! This is because they experimented a lot with various egg-based recipes. They used to make it as a savory side dish adding pepper to the recipe, but eventually they started sweetening the dish for dessert purposes by adding honey instead of sugar. Through their expansion of Europe, Spain who became very interested in the recipe began their own experimentation. They were the first to add the signature caramel sauce over the top. Through Spanish Colonization the dessert was then brought over to the Islands, and South America.

No to the recipe!

Ingredients:

Caramel sauce for topping:

1. 1 cup of sugar

2. Filtered water (optional)

Flán:

1. 6 eggs

2. 1 can of undiluted condensed milk

3. 1 can of Evaporated milk

4. 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Materials:

1. Saucepan

2. Teaspoon

3. 8 x 3 round baking pan

4. 10 x 3 round baking pan

First things first! Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Place your sugar in a saucepan on low heat and let it melt. If your sugar begins to crystalize that’s what the water is for, add in 1 teaspoon and stir it slowly until smooth and let it get to a golden color. Remove your saucepan and then transfer it to your 8 x 3 pan and swirl the caramel around making sure to cover the entire bottom and sides of the pan. Place it in your freezer and let it cool. Add all of your Flán ingredients into a blender, and blend. You will know that your caramelized pan is ready for the batter when you remove it from your freezer, and it cracks! Pour your batter in and cover it with foil. Now you’re going to do a Baño Maria. What this means is that you’re going to fill your 10 x 3 pan with water (not all the way) and place it in your oven, then you will place your batter filled 8 x 3 pan inside of that one. Weird right!! (Quick detail about me… This recipe and the baño maria method has been passed down from my grandma to my aunt and then onto me!). You’re going to bake this for 40 minutes. After the 40 minutes, place a tooth pick down the center, if it clean, your flán is done. If not, then leave it for another 5 minutes and repeat the toothpick check.

Let the flán cool for 15 minutes at room temperature and place it in your refrigerator for at least 4 hours, better if left overnight. When serving this dish, cut your slice and flip it over showing the golden caramel colored side and drizzle some of that caramel on top!

Enjoy!

***Other variation can be made with coconut milk (replacing evaporated milk) and Condensed Coconut milk (for condense milk) and egg substitute for the actual eggs. I’ve never made it this way, but I’ve seen others make it this way due to certain allergies.***

Work Cited:

Group, U. (2019, September 25). What you didn’t know about the origins of flan. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://elpollonorteno.net/what-you-didnt-know-about-the-origins-of-flan/

Thomas Benke: Looking Around In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, in the Chapter “Looking Around,” says this: Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. Otherwise we’d all just be barking away like Pekingese: “Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it’s your fault, you did this …” Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong. She goes on to speak about empathy for other people and also, as an extension empathy for yourself. So, in a sense as you try to write believable, relatable characters, you will come to forgive people their trespasses—because no one believes they are the villain of their story, so you have to write “bad,” or “evil” characters from a point of view where they rationalize what they are doing in such a way that it is the right or only way they see is possible. By extrapolation, then, if you begin to forgive and withhold judgment from your less-than-desirable, or annoying characters, perhaps you can extend the same courtesy to yourself and forgive your own trespasses and sins. This, for me, starts to enter the realm of “writing as therapy,” and though I am a firm believer in that—I practice it to this very day—I think I would caution anyone who thinks that simply writing through things is going to lead you to a place of light and love. I am not saying it can’t by any means. What I am saying is I have wrote through my thoughts and my problems and my desperation and depression for decades and I still had enough baggage on my shoulders to supply an army platoon with rations for a year. In any case, when thinking about craft, it is very important to step into the shoes of all of your characters, especially those characters that you see as antagonists and villians. I believe there are very few universal maxims in writing but one thing is virtually certain: every character you write is your version of that human being. Confucius said “everywhere I go, there I am,” and that is never more true than when you are writing. So if you are writing a character that is distasteful to you, it might be effective for you to ask yourself why that is the case. I wrote a blog for Obscura last semester titled, “The Puppy Had It Coming.” The gist of the article was to pose a puzzle to writers. How can you write a scene where an adult human kicks a puppy across the room and the reader at least understands why. I am not saying there is any way to justify the action or for the readers to be on the human’s side unless they are sociopaths. I am saying you need let the reader know how dark the place is in the character’s mind that he is capable of doing that.