Bills Flan - Custard Recipe

How to make it

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• Pre-heat oven to 350F. This recipe makes a little over a quart of custard so you need 4 custard cups which will hold over 1 1/2 cups custard each. Also, you need a large pan with at least 4 inch sides as a water bath for the cups... check before hand that they will fit. Put the pan with at least an inch of hot water in it to heat in the oven.
• Grease the cups with the margarine or margarine - may even be able to use the cooking spray. Sprinkle a tablespoon or two of brown sugar in the bottom of each custard cup - no need to be picky here as the sugar will dissolve and spread out as the custard cooks.
• Dump all the rest into a blender container and blend on high until all the ingredients are well distributed - at least 20 seconds for most blenders. Don't worry about getting any air in the liquid as it will come out during the cooking process.
• Put the blended custard mix into the 4 cups - they will take a little over a cup each. Don't worry about disturbing the brown sugar - it will stay at the bottom and turn to a sauce during cooking. Sprinkle some nutmeg over the top of each custard. Put foil over each cup. Carefully put each cup into the water bath in the pan in the oven. Remember, everything is HOT!
• Bake for an hour and turn off the oven. When things are cool so you can handle the cups, put them in the fridge to set completely.
• After a couple of hours or overnight, they will be ready. To serve, remove foil and run a thin spatula around the edges of each. Put a serving plate upside down on the top of each custard and quickly flip each - the custard should drop to the plate and be covered with the sauce. Serve and enjoy!
• This recipe turned out very well - you could substitute something like coconut pudding for the vanilla pudding and try different extracts. And if you want, you can go to the trouble of heating sugar in a frying pan and pouring some of the caramelized sugar into the bottoms of the custard cups. It makes the sauce a lot richer but for some is more trouble than it is worth. And of course you can substitute milk for the water, but I find that doing that just increases the cost with no improvement in the custard. In fact, I am experimenting now on a custard which contains no milk at all - just the water.
• Note: this recipe was also posted on my thread: http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=24619925