Finally Flan

So after long last, I attempted to make flan. Apparently there is a British dessert called flan (pronounced differently as if it rhymed with land) that is somewhat like a pie without a lid. This caused a bit of confusion when I said I would make flan for Ed's birthday Die Hard get-together which was only cleared up when I began making some and they wondered what on earth I was doing.

My roommate Annemarie used to make wonderful flan, so I asked her for her recipe and thankfully it was much simpler than the horribly-complicated one I found online requiring an actual vanilla bean. In any case it only needed sugar, milk, and eggs! I managed to work out some cookware that would make a waterbath for the flan to cook in, which besides a little bit of overflow worked out pretty well. To first caramelize the sugar the recipe called for 1/4 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons, but in my own haste to get started and panic that people were watching my cook something new I accidentally poured in a whole cup. At this point, it all started to go awry. I quickly decided that since we needed to raise the quantities for more people anyway that we would just quadruple everything from then on. Well, this might have worked if Jess had had a clearer notion of what a tablespoon was. He somehow thought, and still does think despite all 4 people there telling him otherwise, that a tablespoon was a giant server spoon, not an actual table spoon. It might have helped if I had remembered to bring my measuring cups, but usually it works out fine estimating using the silverware (as people seem to do here most often for some reason). In any case there was WAY too much water in there, so to even it out I added more sugar. And more sugar. And even more sugar. At the end I had no idea how much I had put in, but Lotty seemed to think it was the best plan of action as well, and she bakes a lot too. It seemed to work out fine, if it took a lot longer to caramelize than it should.

The unusual measurements and hodge-podge-ness of the endeavor continued as I warmed the milk (even now I cannot remember how many cups there were). I only doubled the number of eggs, since quadrupling was out of the question- we didnt have 16 eggs to use for flan! Its a good thing I didnt, too, because when I added the milk and the other bits of sugar to the eggs and poured it all into the caramelized-sugar-coated dishes, it was overflowing! I even spilled some on my shoes when I was trying to put one in the water bath.

After all the trials and questionable decisions of this attempt at flan, understandably they did not taste up to the same standard as Annemarie's variety. But it was pretty tasty and edible, so I would mark it as a relative success in the end!