Favorite Flan

From the Food Lover's Companion:

Ring Mold: Used for everything from cakes to breads to gelatin dishes, ring molds range in diameter from 2 to 7 inches and are 2 to 21⁄2 inches deep. These molds are typically made of aluminum or glass; their center hole is larger than that of a bundt or tube pan. The ring mold is also known as a rice ring, in which case it's used to mold hot rice.

Springform Pan: A round pan with high, straight sides (21⁄2 to 3 inches) that expand with the aid of a spring or clamp. The separate bottom of the pan can be removed from the sides when the clamp is released. This allows cakes, tortes or cheesecakes that might otherwise be difficult to remove from the pan to be extricated easily by simply removing the pan's sides. Springform pans range in diameter from 6 to 12 inches.

Please note these two definitions. They will come in useful as you read this entry, which, it turns out, is about Flan.

Our friends Connie & Ed Swenson (now Connie & Ed & Ellie Swenson) sent us this recipe. Josh knows Connie from Ames; she was (is) one of his sister's BFFs, but Connie & Josh took Japanese class together in high school and I guess forged their own friendship. Her husband Ed, whom I believe she garnered at Cornell if I am not mistaken, is like some sort of modern-day Indiana Jones--albeit milder mannered. Ed is an anthroplogy professor (in Canada, eh), and often goes on several months-long research trips to places like Peru. Any person in their right mind would realize this is fascinating and ask him lots of questions, like whether or not he has found the Holy Grail and how was it really to work with Carrie Fisher, but somehow I get waylaid and always talk with them about more mundane things like, Oh this is a nice apartment and Isn't Ellie cute.

All three Swensons (Swensai?) are pretty terrific, and Connie is a pretty marvelously supportive blog fan, so it was exciting to discover a recipe from them. Until, that is, I discovered said recipe was for flan and included terrifying instructions like 'put flan in hot water bath.' Plus, it is in minuscule, vision-destroying (albeit attractive) font, which adds another deterrent layer to reading the instructions.

Josh, however, heard flan was on the menu and started doing a party dance. I personally am not a big flan person (shock), but it seems someone else in this household is. And someone was pretty damn excited to have flan for dessert. O, how someone should not get his hopes up.

First I realized--after I'd conned Josh into making dinner (fabulous pasta sauce a la Josh--yum) on the premise that flan would be his dessert--that it needed to set in the refrigerator over night. But that was far from the only problem. Would that it were.

You see, it seems that, contrary to previous statements, I am a complete moron. One who is incapable of understanding the English language, evidently. This is because it appears I misunderstood a key, yet not exactly complex, part of the instructions. The part that told me to bake the flan in a ring mold, which in my sad, sad little mind I read as "springform mold."

Do you know the difference between these two things? You should as I just gave you the definition above. But I, dear readers, did not. In short, a ring mold is a mold (often like a bundt cake mold) that is a mold, a normal mold, with a hole in the center. A springform mold is basically like a cake pan but it's got latches on the side that tighten/loosen the round part on the side, so that when you loosen it it becomes ever so slightly larger and the bottom drops out. It has no hole in the center. And more importantly it is very, very water permeable.

Why does this matter? Well, because when you make flan, as previously mentioned, you put it in a 'hot water bath.' When you do this with a ring mold, as Connie instructed, I can only imagine it turns out looking like a flan. When you do this with a springform cake mold, however, several things happen:

1. Because there is no hole in the center, it floats in the hot water bath and goes all wonky and lopsided like the Titanic before it made its final pitch into the Atlantic.
2. Because it is by its very nature not impermeable, water from the hot water bath seeps in and floods the flan, collecting in a giant pool of flan-water on the top. And preventing it from cooking all the way through.

Bet you didn't know that, did you?

In my defense, whether or not I have stated it before, I didn't exactly get lots of cooking lessons as a child. I would think things like, 'I want to bake a cake!!' and my mother would think things like, 'I am going to have to clean up the kitchen for 4 hours afterwards!' and add another cable station to our roster to keep me out of the way. By the time I was older and she wanted to teach me how to cook things, I was already too hooked on TV to care. As a result, one of my best friends, Beth, whose mother is a majorly amazing cook and had their kitchen redesigned so she could have a wood-fire oven, bakes things that look like this:

Gorgeous

And this:

Now you're just showing off

In contrast, I, who grew up with a mother who fed that same friend raw turkey burgers and then blamed it on the oven, try to bake what actually appears to be pretty easy and straightforward flan, wind up with this:

Not good

It's almost like flan, but with some sort of leaking, bubbling skin disease.

Worse than that, though, is my deep, abiding regret that I didn't take a picture of it floating on the hot water bath with the layer of water coating it's top. That is an oversight from which I may never recover, but in my defense at this point I had basically abdicated the flan to Josh, who, God love him, knew there was something wrong, but loves me too much to rub it in and loves flan too much to give up on it.

Instead, he looked at the flan and said: "The hot water appears to be getting in," to which I looked at the evidence plainly in front of my face and said, "That's impossible." I mean, after all, how could water leap over the sides of the mold and get IN? Trick answer brain: It doesn't. It just has to leak through all the ample holes in the bottom.

Too Iowa polite to explain to me that I'm an idiot--and also faced with the irrefutable logic that who cares if it is going wrong, the charge for this blog is to follow the instructions and see how they come out, not solve problems--Josh let it go for a while. Then his love for flan overcame him and he took it out of the oven. And then (are you sitting down?) siphoned off the flan-water from the top with an iced-tea spoon. And drank it.

I can't remember why we decided he should look
serious in this picture. Probably because he just
drank a glass of flan juice.

We put the flan in the fridge to set overnight and hoped for the best, which of course didn't come--as you know, having seen that flan-oozing picture earlier. Connie calls for garnishing with berries, so I went a little overboard on that front trying to salvage the wreck. Plus, I did have the fun of using some peppermint from our garden.


Our friend Megan is visiting, so I called her in for flan breakfast. She ran in chanting, 'Flan flan flan!' and then took one look at it and ran away. It was in fact she who figured ou the ring mold/spring form problem. And enjoyed laughing at me about it.

In revenge, I made her eat the flan. It actually tastes like flan, it just disintegrates on the plate and looks like vomit. But the berries were good.

Connie's Not Difficult But Still Effed Up Favorite Flan

Preheat oven to 325-350.

Cover an 8" RING MOLD, which is not a SPRINGFORM PAN, with a layer of sugar (about 4 tbsp). Heat over medium flame on the stove's top, which is awkward with a springform and probably just as awkward with a ring mold. Allow sugar to caramelize and bubble, tilting to coat evenly. Be proud you at least learned how to caramelize sugar. Remove from heat, cool.

Whisk lightly (no bubbles) (or, lots of bubbles because how else do you get the eggs to mix) until sugar is dissolved:

5 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
3 1/2 cups whole milk
1 tsp vanilla
a dash of salt

Pour half of the mixture into RING MOLD not springform mold. Place mold into a large baking dish in a hot water bath (about 1" of boiling water). Be terrified you are going to scald yourself with giant roaster pan full of boiling water. Place in oven, which is a lot harder than you'd think. Wonder why the springform mold is floating awkwardly on top of the water. Carefully pour rest of mixture into mold, which helps even it out a little. Realize far too late that this wouldn't be a problem if you were using a RING MOLD, which, with a hole in the center, would not float.

Bake at 325-350 for an hour until flan is set (until a knife inserted comes out clean). After hour, see puddle of water collected on top. Wonder what has happened. Let it cook another half hour. Puddle still there. Let Josh take over, taking flan out of bath, siphoning off water, and putting back in oven for another half hour. Flan still not set. Pretend it is anyhow.

If using RING MOLD LIKE YOU SHOULD, remove from hot water bath when flan is set after an hourish. Allow mold to cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight.

To serve: Run knife along both outer and inner circumferences of RING MOLD. Or have no need to do this because it is still un-set jelly in a springform mold. Place a large serving dish over the ring mold. Quickly invert the ring mold over the dish to release the flan.

Garnish with raspberries (on one half for me) or blackberries (on one half for Megan, who hates raspberries because she is weird) and mint leaves. Hide in refrigerator until you can throw it away when no one is looking.