Recipe: Flan

Looking for a Cinco De Mayo dessert?  Try this easy Flan recipe.  I have made this recipe countless times and its always a hit.  Taste great the next day too.  Enjoy!!

Flan

Ingredients:

1 (14 ounces) can sweetened condensed milk

1 ¼ cup milk

4 large eggs

½ cup sugar (for the caramel)

In a blender mix, the can of sweetened condensed milk, milk and eggs. Blend for 30 seconds and set aside. Place a 8 inch cake pan (I use a Wilton metal pan) on a counter ready for when caramel is done.

In a sauce pan on medium-low add ½ cup granulated sugar. Stir consistently until sugar dissolves and becomes liquid and light brown, do not put on high heat, sugar will burn fast, be sure to stir consistently.

As soon as caramel is done, immediately pour into the cake pan. Spread on the bottom, this will harden fast, so work fast.

Now mix the milk mix for a few seconds just to make sure it is combined. Pour mix over caramel. Cover the pan with Reynolds wrap.

Place the pan that had the flan in it, in a larger Pyrex type dish, add water to the PYREX PAN ONLY, NOT IN THE FLAN. Place the flan pan that is in a water bath in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

The flan is ready when it is set in the center.

When the flan is done, take the flan pan out of the water bath and let it cool completely. Then refrigerate the flan still in the pan for at least 2 hours or overnight.

To serve the flan, you will need a large plate with a lip to hold in the caramel. Right before you are ready to serve the flan, run a butter knife around the outside edge of the flan to make sure the edges are loose. Then twist the pan back and forth quickly — the flan is loose if it moves freely within the pan. Now place the plate on top of the flan pan where the lid was. Holding the flan pan and plate tightly together, flip the plate and pan over so that the plate is on the bottom and flan pan. Carefully lift off the flan pan. Your flan should be sitting in the caramel on the plate, ready to enjoy!

TIPS: since making this a few times, I found it was very difficult to get the caramel to cover the bottom of the pan completely, what I like to do is while the oven is preheating, I put the empty flan pan into the oven, this heats the pan and gives the caramel more time to spread, because both pan and caramel are hot.  But even if you cant get it to spread, the caramel does melt in the pan either way while cooking, as you can see in the photo, the caramel turns liquid while baking.  This is pretty easy to make, the photo above was my first attempt.

I have looked at other flans and noticed some have bubbles, some do not.  Mine had bubbles, being new to this recipe myself I am unsure of which is correct.  I can say, this was delicious and bubbles are not, I will make this many more times.

Source: I wrote this recipe down a long time ago and am unaware of original source.