I made flan for dessert the other night (for guests), in small 1/2 cup ramekins and they really did shrink more than I thought they would. So I started thinking about how I could give them some height. In the freezer, I had a genoise round cake layer I had made a few weeks ago and ended up not using. I had split it horizontally so I had two thin layers. Genoise is an incredibly simple sponge-type cake. It isn't super sweet and tends toward dryness--in Europe it is the foundation for many wonderful desserts as it is typically brushed with some kind of syrup. This got me thinking: what if I took some liqueur, flamed off the alcohol and brushed that on little rounds of the genoise. Then placed the genoise on top of the ramekin before flipping it onto a dessert plate. The result would be a half-inch thick round of cake topped with a silky round of flan, with of course, the caramel shimmering on the top. I tried Chambourd raspberry liqueur and then tried Amaretto. Both were good--so I combined them! It needed something else, so I took a peach, a fresh apricot and a fresh plum (all local--from a Fredericksburg farmer I buy eggs from) and finely diced them. I let them macerate in a bit of the liqueur syrup. At serving time, I topped each flan with a nice mound of the diced fruit. Voila!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment