Easy Organic Vanilla Flan

Vanilla Flan

Happy New Year everyone! This has been an unseasonably warm winter, even for Florida. I think new record high temperatures were set for December. It was a bit hard to get into the holiday spirit with such warm weather. So instead, in the spirit of the milder temperatures, I decided to go tropical and make a creamy, delicious and easy organic vanilla flan! My husband lived for many years in Madrid, and he says that this is the best flan he has ever eaten.
I should tell you that this is not a make it and eat it the same day kind of dessert. You should definitely make it the day before you want to serve it. If you have never made flan before, what are you waiting for? It is really easy. I promise. The most challenging part is making the caramel sauce, but that really isn’t difficult either. And all you need are six ingredients! Are you ready? Let’s make flan!

Easy Organic Vanilla Flan

Easy Organic Vanilla Flan after inversion onto a plate.

Easy Organic Vanilla Flan
2/3 cup organic sugar
1 tablespoon fresh squeezed organic orange juice
1 14 ounce can organic sweetened condensed milk
1 12 ounce can organic evaporated milk
5 large organic eggs
1 tablespoon organic vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Get a small to medium sized heavy saucepan. Add your sugar and orange juice. Cook over medium-high heat stirring constantly until sugar dissolves and the mixture turns a golden-amber color. You don’t want it to get too dark or it will taste burnt. Remove from heat and pour directly into an 8- or 9-inch round cake pan. With oven mitts on, quickly move around cake pan to cover the bottom with the caramel sauce. The caramel sauce will cool and set up into a hard-candy mass in a very short time. Plus, the temperature of the sauce will make the pan very hot also, so be sure to wear oven mitts.

This next step can be done a variety of different ways. You can use a blender, immersion blender, a bowl and whisk, whatever. Choose your method. I prefer the immersion blender method. Combine the sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, eggs and vanilla and blend well. Pour this mixture into the cake pan on top of the caramel sauce. Tightly cover the pan with aluminum foil. Take the cake pan and set it inside of a larger (and equally deep, but not deeper) pan. Put this into the oven add hot water to the larger, outer pan to halfway up the side of the cake pan holding the flan mixture. This is a water bath, what the French call a Bain Marie. It helps cook the flan to a creamy consistency instead of a scrambled egg consistency. Believe me, you don’t want to do this without the water bath. Bake the flan in the water bath for 50 minutes to an hour. Remove it from the oven and from the water bath and place into the refrigerator overnight.

When you are ready to serve the flan, remove it from the refrigerator. Run a clean knife around the outside edge of the cake pan to loosen it from the sides of the pan. Place your serving plate upside-down onto the cake pan. Hold on to the plate and the pan and invert. The flan should fall cleanly out of the pan onto your plate with the sauce, which has turned back into a sauce. There will be a little bit of hard caramel stuck to the pan, but hot water and soap should take that right off. Cut your flan with a sharp knife like you would cut a pie. Serve with the sauce and enjoy!!

Vanilla Flan