Tag Archives: custard

Irish Apple Cake with Custard

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apple cake 3Sue posted this recipe for Irish Apple Cake on her blog The View from Great Island, and I put one together tonight as I was making dinner and ducking out of the kitchen every few minutes to watch our San Francisco Giants win the first game of the National League playoffs – yay! It’s a wonder I didn’t burn something; as it was, it took me until bedtime to get the last pot, bowl and springform pan washed.

< (After you spreaapple cake 1d the cake batter in the bottom of the pan, you make a layer of the sliced apples.)

The only thing I changed was the custard sauce, for which I cut the sugar by a third, and it was very nice. The whole cake is rich and very appley without being overly sweet, so that the streusel topping, for example, can be enjoyed in all its buttery crunchiness and you don’t feel that you are eating a caapple cake 2ndy bar.

(A streusel topping covers the apples as the final layer.) >

I used some Gala apples because I find the recommended Granny Smith to have a one-note sour taste; but the Galas were kind of blah so I added the juice of a lemon to brighten them up. I wouldn’t cut back on the amount of apple – in fact, I’d like to experiment and add one more apple, but next time I will go out of my way to find more flavorful fruit. Other than the barest hint of cinnamon there is not a lot of intense flavor to the cake, so the taste of the fruit is important.

My springform pan was 10″ in diameter instead of the 9″ that was called for, but the cake turned out lovely. It was ready about the time the baseball game was over, and we were in a good mood then and felt celebratory. Mr. Glad liked the cake very well.

apple cake 5

Custard Show

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3 custards Sept 14

Mr. Glad did love the flan I made, but turned down my offer to make more right away, because by his way of thinking the caramel part made them too sweet to enjoy often. I took up the challenge to make something just as yummy but less intense that way, and while I was at it I made variations on the theme with pumpkin and chocolate. Too experimental to tell about in detail, but it was easy, and they are certainly easy to eat.

I made flan!

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Ever since I met him, my dear husband has spoken very fondly of flan. Perhaps it has something to do with the associated memories of a trip he took to Mexico with his family when he was a teenager.

Until this moment, when I was looking for a link to post, I didn’t realize that flan is just the word Mexicans and some others use for crème caramel. Perhaps because we have so many Hispanics in California, I always assumed it originated in Latin America.

I’d never tried to make anything of this sort fancier than cup custard, from milk and eggs. But recently Mr. Glad came home from work with a recipe gleaned from the many Filipina women he works with, and when we were next at the market together we bought the main ingredients, in three cans.

Before removing from baking dishes

I did some more research before attempting to make this dessert. It was the sugar-melting-to-caramel that was new and frightening to me. The cans sat on my counter for a couple of weeks until I could also lay in a supply of eggs and find myself with time to cook on this rainy and cold day.

There are so many family recipes out there, and so much advice about techniques, I think I’ll just post the ingredients I used, which were pretty much according to one of the “Mexican Flan” recipes. I noticed disagreement about whether to stir or not stir the sugar when it is caramelizing; I stirred. I ended up filling one small pie plate and four ramekins with the quantity I made, which, by the way, would not fit at one time into my blender. I used:

1 cup sugar for the caramel
1 12-oz can evaporated milk
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
3 large eggs
3 egg yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup canned Nestle Media Crema (Mexican food aisle)

I thought the finished custard should be smoother on the sides. One has to run a knife along the sides to loosen the custard before turning it out on a plate, and that seems to rough it up a bit. Maybe a ramekin is not the best shape of baking dish? Also, a lot of the caramel stayed in the bottom of the ramekins as hard as candy, so you don’t see the flan sitting in a puddle of the syrup. That’s o.k. There was plenty of sweet stuff on the top. I haven’t turned the pie plate out yet to see if it is smoother.

The caramel wasn’t difficult. I was sure I would burn it or spill it when my husband came into the kitchen and started asking me a stream of questions at the crucial moment, but it survived even that distraction.

I baked the custards for about 40 minutes. I ate mine when it was still a little warm, but firm, and it was one of the best flans I’ve ever eaten. It wasn’t watery as they sometimes are.  The husband also pronounced it Very Good.