Llena mi tacita: You can’t mess up flan, yet here we are

Buenos dias mis tacitas!

Recently, a friend of mine, let’s call them X, and I were baking cause I was stressed and so was she. The first thing we decided to do was to make flan. Now, I did not plan the flan so she was taking the lead on this, just so we have an established base line of who lead the baking and whatnot.

General Ingredients

Flan’s basic ingredients are eggs and dairy. The dairy is split into condensed milk, evaporated milk, and milk of your choice. You can add vanilla extract if you want your flan to be a bit sweeter. Since my friend wanted to make a thicker flan, they added white bread (of course, adding bread is optional). And, of course, the caramel on the top is from just melting sugar in a saucepan and being really quick to pour it into whatever mold you have. I cannot stress enough how quick you have to be for that, it will pop up later in this blog.

General Recipe

In order to make flan you have to blend up all these ingredients, and after you make the caramel top, you pour in the mixture and put that container in another bigger container that can hold it. In the bigger container, you’ll put in a small amount of water for it to bake in since it will use a a type of steam to help it bake, this technique is called Baño Maria. I believe you also cover the flan with foil for like 15 min and take the foil off so it bakes for the rest of the time without the foil. The flan will bake for about 45 min, give or take. Like a cake, if you stick a fork in the flan and it comes out clean, you successfully baked flan.

Going Downhill

Now that we all know, give or take, what goes into flan and how it’s made, we can get into the details of what went down and how you too can save flan after 3 failed attempts.

At first, everything was going fine. The ingredients were blended to how X makes their flan and things were great. Now it was time to make the caramel; I think this marked the fall of the next events. When you are making the caramel top, you have to eye how much sugar you start to melt so there is enough to cover the pan that it is put in. We under estimated the amount of sugar that was needed, so we struggled to spread the now caramel to cover the bottom of the pan.

The real hiccup that made the flan be in the oven for hours was that we forgot about taking the foil off the container after 15 min. And thus, the flan never really baked and was still like a mixture that was blended instead of edible flan. I won’t specify how long it took us to realize that we had to take off the foil because even that was an experiment of “Maybe doing this will work” instead of going “Oh wait, we forgot a crucial step.” Either way, once we took off the foil and let the flan bake for the amount of time it needed to bake, it came out as edible and delicious.

So remember, take the foil off after 15 min of baking and don’t put too much water in the Baño Maria.

Happy baking and be sure what you make is edible and, as always, learn from your mistakes!