Happy Chinese New Year!

Here comes the year of the rabbit! I terribly failed at collecting even a single red envelope this year, but that did not stop me celebrating the New Year's with the Chan and the Katdhare (not exactly Chinese, but they have a nice kitchen and very cute new baby). Kim and Susan did most of the cooking, mainly the seaweed dish that suppose to bring good luck and stir-fried noodle, with a little help from Ani. I just brought the usual suspect, dessert. For me, when you combine these words- desserts, Chinese, yummy, and sweet stuff- only one thing comes in mind, the Hong Kong style egg tarts (yep, like those you get at the dim sum place).

Okay, this sounds a bit odd, but I actually have been busy with Lab works. So I decided to make the tarts the cheating way. For the crust, I used store bought puff pastry sheet (I'm still amazed that I actually found an unused sheet in my freezer) that I rolled thinner, then cut in circles to fit my tartlett tins. I found that it works better to press the crust up higher than the side of the tins, since the crust will shrink and slide down as it bakes (sorry, I was in hurry and didn't take picture to illustrate this). I managed to get enough dough for 12 tartlettes from 1 sheet of puff pastry. After shaping, I chilled the crust while making the custard filling. I used the recipe from a blog posted by Christine for the custard (hers look gazillion times better than mine, and I'm sure her crust works wonderful too!). Her custard recipe ended up more than enough to fill my 12 tartlettes (I probably can make 20 from this recipe, with the size of tins I used). Then I thought about what can I make with the rest of the custard (see below for what I ended up making). But now, the tarts, I baked them following Christine's direction and behold... the egg tarts!




Alright, now back home and on to the rest of the custard. After much deliberation, I decided on turning it into flan. Yes, flan, it should work, right? It's just baked custard, after all. However, this would make eggier and less creamier flan than the normal recipe, but at least I don't have to dump the rest of the custard down the sink. I placed ~1tbsp of sugar onto the bottom of 4 custard dishes and put them in the 375F oven until all sugar melted and turned into caramel (how long will depend on the size of dish you're using and how much sugar, so you just need to watch them). Carefully I took them out of the oven and swirled the caramel to cover the bottom of the dishes (as always, caramel is super hot), then I poured the rest of the custard into each custard dish (humm, I wonder why people call these custard dishes). I put the dishes onto a cake pan and poured boiling water until ~1/2-way up, covered it (I just placed cookie sheet on top), and put the whole contraption into the oven for 30-minutes. Let the flan chill in the fridge overnight before you enjoy them to let the caramel soften. Run knife around the side and flip onto plate.