Hello again. Today I will be doing another classic favourite of mine. This desert, you can find basically all around the world. Every country seems to have their own variations on it. It is basically a custard sometimes with a caramel glaze or sauce. You have the crema catalana, the Spanish flan, the Crème brûlée, the Panna cotta and yes the “Crema de zahăr ars” in Romania. This basically means burnt sugar cream 😉

Here I will be presenting the classic Romanian form of this desert, it is more similar to a Spanish flan but it is extremely simple to do, and doesn’t need any special tools or skills.

What do we need? The ingredients are for a bigger batch, feel free to do only half of it, but I warn you, you will be wanting more when it’s gone.

1 litter milk (35 oz or 4.2 cups)

6 large eggs or 8 small ones

200 g (7 oz) sugar for mix + 150g (5 oz) sugar for caramel

1 vanilla pod

For this recipe I used unrefined sugar, because I like the taste of it more, but it is difficult to work with when doing caramel, because it tends to burn and get bitter really quickly. If you are doing this for the fist time, I would suggest using white sugar.

You can do this in a nice glass vessel, I just tend to do it in a metal pot, either one works just as well (I recommend using a relatively wide vessel so that it doesn’t come out to thick and you get the caramel taste evenly spread through the custard – 30 cm / 12 in).

1. Before we start you can turn on the oven and let it heat up. We want a low temperature of about 140-150°C (300°F). If you will be doing this in a glass vessel, put it in the oven so that it also heats up a little.

2. First of all, we slice the vanilla pod lengthwise and scrape out the seeds. We take about one cup of the milk and bring it to a gentile boil and throw in the vanilla pod shell and seeds and let it cook for 2 minutes. Then we take it off the stove and mix it with the rest of the milk so that it cools down. We take out the vanilla pod, the seeds can stay in.

If you are using vanilla aroma just skip this part and ad it to the cold milk.

3. Then we take the eggs, milk with vanilla and 200 g of sugar and mix them very well together.

4. The 150 g of sugar for the caramel we take and put them in a metal pot on medium heat. We let the sugar melt completely and start caramelizing. We want to get a nice caramel, golden-brown in colour, if it goes to dark it can be bitter.

Actually, white sugar is not that pretentious, you have to get it actually black and set off the smoke detectors to turn it bitter, so don’t worry about the perfect colour. With brown sugar.. keep a close eye on it.

5. If we are using a glass vessel, we take the caramel and pour it in, if not we just leave it in the pot where we melted it. Either way we want to spread it on the walls about 5 cm high (2 inches) You can use a spatula to do this, but I find that twirling the vessel works best and you get an even coating. As you turn the pot around the caramel starts to cool down and stick to the walls, and with each turn you thicken up this coating. And eventually the whole caramel is sticking to the walls. This caramel coating will crackle and crack in places, it’s normal.

Don’t worry about your pots, the entire caramel will dissolve during baking and won’t leave any traces on them.

6. Now we take our egg-milk mixture and pour it into the vessel. When we add in the mixture the caramel tends to crackle even more, don’t worry about it.

Before we put it in the oven, we want to put some water in there so that it steams a bit, because otherwise it tends to cook to quickly and turn into a sweet omelette. I usually take a roasting tray and pour in 2 or 3 cups of water and put it on the bottom of the oven. Some people like to put the pot with the custard in another larger pot with water and bake it like this, either way works. I decided to just put the pot in the roasting tray with water this time.

7. We let it bake for about 50-60 minutes, checking on it from time to time, if the water gets low, just pour in another cup. If it starts to get dark on the top, just put a bit of damp baking sheet or aluminium foil loos over it.

8. When you take it out of the oven it will be very jiggly, just let it cool down, and then stick it the fridge for a couple of hours. You can portion it straight out of the pot, or you can turn it over on platter, just be careful not to spill the delicious caramel sauce in which it will be swimming because everyone will be wanting some of it.

And enjoy!

If possible, with a nice home-made lemonade (recipe will follow)!