espresso flan Tag

CARAMEL ESPRESSO FLAN/BUTTER ROUX CAKE

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THE CAKE HAS VENTURED BEYOND CHEMISTRY, INTO THE REALM OF PHYSICS…

EVERY time I unearth a truly fantastic recipe out of the landslides of materials and inspirations that bury most of my time nowadays, regardless whether it is original or reinvented, I experience a flush of anxiety which I’d like to call the competitive blogging disorder.  Symptoms include increasing heart-rates and twitching ankles, a not-exactly-little voice inside my ill-motivated head saying things that don’t exactly reflect my best, generous self.

Things like, gah I hope I’m one of the few living bodies on earth who know about his.  Gah I must publish this recipe now, like right now!, like in any given second somebody else might hijack my discovery.  Gah I hope when I Google “flan cake”, nothing, and I mean nothing… in the English-speaking world at least, would show up on the first page.

But of course, like most of my wishes nowadays, the answers from God-gle, are usually negative.

When I stumbled on an Asian baking-blog by accident last week, and discovered something called the “flan cake”, I thought ding-ding-ding!  I mean after all, it isn’t everyday that I look upon a cake-recipe that has ventured beyond chemistry, into the realm… of great physics.  A cake with two distinctively different layers that bake simultaneously, but magically self-separates.  A cake that bakes on the laws of physics, that lighter mass in weight (in this case, the sponge cake-batter), will float above denser mass (in this case, the flan custard), and that there’s nothing you can do to sabotage it.  It’s not just a failsafe cake.  It’s an anti-fail cake.  Guaranteed by science.  How could I not be excited?

But of course as it turns out, like all other great ideas, God-gle already knew a few.  Fuck.

BUT again, a closer look into all the flan-cake recipes shown up on the research, my CBD relapsed.  Not only that most of these recipes uses a cake-premix, but even the ones that don’t, involves the dull and tiresome sponge cake-method of using vegetable oil or creaming butter.  Gah, I’m back!  I could still be the first second third… number of handful people to tell you about this, ahem, fucking awesome cake.  Because. the true genius of this particular flan-cake lies not only on the magic of the two self-separating layers of flan and sponge cake, but also on the miraculous outcome of a butter-roux cake batter.  Yes, a roux cake.  The combination of the two wonders, a cocktail of miracles, from what I can tell, is still a relatively under-exposed secret.

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