There’s no such dessert called flan soup in any recipe book I know. But some of the best foods in the world are mistakes. Popsicles, deep-fried ravioli, potato chips.
To that list, I now add flan soup. Tastes just like flan, but you bake it forever and it never solidifies into custard. Instead, you get a golden top and a liquid, syrupy, delicious base. I loved it. So did everyone else. I even topped it with beautiful but poorly glazed cherries and heck, it looked pretty.
The nice thing about soup is you can eat it with a spoon. I guess also that it goes down easy. This soup is pure bliss. Skip the heavy cream or coconut milk, accidentally-on-purpose use vanilla almond milk instead and sit back and relax until your flan never solidifies. It’s the most satisfying mistake you’ll make for awhile. Thank goodness no one’s perfect. With mistakes like this, who’d want to get things right?
Flan Soup with Glazed Cherries
1 1/2 cups cane sugar
6 egg yolks
12 egg whites (use the rest of the yolks to make mayonnaise or aioli or ice cream)
7 1/2 cups sweetened vanilla almond milk
1 tsp vanilla extract or 1 vanilla beans, scraped
1/2 tsp salt
Melt the sugar in a medium saucepan over medim-low heat and cook, stirring occasionally, ntil light brown (about 10 minutes).
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Pour into an 11″x7″ baking dish. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks and whites. Beat in the remaining ingredients and pour over sugar in dish. Place the dish inside a larger roasting pan and fill the pan halfway up the sides of the dish with boiling water.
Bake for 1 1/2 hours, or longer, until the top is brown and it’s not ridiculously jiggly anymore. Cook up to 30 minutes more if you want, then give up on it ever thickening. Remove the dish from the roasting pan and move to a rack to cool.
Glazed Cherries
1 lb cherries
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
Wash and dry un-pitted cherries and place in a single layer on a baking sheet so they don’t touch. Cook the sugar and water in a small saucepan until the sugar reaches 220F. Pour over the cherries. Stir every 5 minutes until cool so the sugar glazes the cherries all over. When cool, garnish the flan and dive into your flan soup.
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