Renée’s Classic Flan

Flan is super sweet. If you're not used to eating dessert anymore, eating a piece of flan can make you feel borderline high. I had a piece of Renée's Classic Flan at my two year old's birthday party the other day, and it was exhilarating. That's a good thing! We should all aim to be at a place in life where we can truly enjoy flan for what it was meant to be: Decadence that goes down easy.

Caramel is a classic flavor that will never go out of style. It's also a beautiful color that is so festive and, again, classic. And this flan uses the simplest of simple methods to get that caramel, which is just to melt sugar. That's right! No butter, no shortening. Just melt sugar and make a caramel that is clear, like glass. The nicest feature of all of this luxury is that it's inexpensive. All you need is love, and like 10 bucks if you have the pan already. Maybe ask your neighbor if they have a bundt pan.

Flan can be very dense, dry, and heavy, almost like a brick of greek yogurt. My mom's flan is nothing like that. It's got the perfect consistency. On a scale of one to ten between jello and custard, my mom's flan is a perfect 5. Not too jiggly, and not too pastey. It is perfect, refreshing, light, and beautiful. When I was little, she would caramelize sugar in the bottom of a bundt pan, and she'd give me a spoon of the hardened caramel to suck on. Clear and golden, it looked like amber to me, and I would delight in eating it slowly like a lollipop.

If you want to dress it up a little bit, get some vanilla bean scrapings and add that to the recipe in the beginning.