Caramel Custard aka Caramel Flan

This is one of my favorite desserts. Any Mexican restaurant will have this delicate and delicious dessert item on its menu. It is very fascinating how the basic ingredients available in any pantry, viz, milk, eggs and sugar can amalgamate to form this lovely sweet delicacy.
Although vanilla custard is the most popular of the lot and my favorite, chocolate lovers will enjoy the chocolate variation while coffee lovers will relish the mocha variation. Here is the recipe for vanilla caramel custard. Try it out and let me know how it turns out.

Ingredients
•Evaporated Milk: 2 cups
•Whole Milk : 1 cup
•Sugar: 1 cup
•Sugar for caramelization: ½ cup
•Eggs: 4
•Vanilla Essence: 1.5 teaspoons

Kitchen Items Required
•A baking dish to bake the custard
•An oven safe dish to prepare the water bath
•A thick bottomed skillet to caramelize sugar and a wooden spatula
•Serving dish

Method

Making Caramelized sugar:
Heat ½ cup of sugar in a thick bottomed skillet. Add just around 2-4 drops of water. Keep stirring the sugar syrup using a wooden spatula till it changes to a deep golden brown color. Remove the mixture from the heat and pour it into the dish in which you will be baking the custard. Spread the caramel evenly around the bottom of the dish and also a little on the sides.

Making the custard:
1) Mix eggs and sugar in a bowl and whisk the mixture. Ensure that you don’t beat it too much, since that could create air bubbles, which spoil the texture of the flan
2) Add the evaporated milk, whole milk and the vanilla essence into this mixture and continue whisking it lightly.
3) Pour this mixture into the prepared baking dish which already has the layer of caramelized sugar.
Note:
a) If you do not have evaporated milk, substitute with the same quantity of whole milk. But in this case, it is recommended that you heat the milk before adding it to the egg and sugar mixture.
b) If you are calorie conscious, you could substitute whole milk for either 2% milk or skimmed milk.
To know the differences between whole milk, 2% milk and skimmed milk you could follow this link:
c) If you are diabetic, sugar in this recipe could be substituted for Splenda or any similar sweetener.

Baking the custard:
The custard is baked in a conventional oven on a water bath because of its delicate texture.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Place the custard dish in an oven safe pan of hot water. Cook in oven at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes or until knife inserted into the centre of the custard comes clean.
The custard will continue baking once it is removed from the oven . To avoid this, remove the dish from oven and immediately place it in a pan of ice cold water and let it sit there till it has completely cooled down.Once cool, refrigerate till it is ready to serve.

Just before serving , run a sharp edged knife around the edges of the dish and invert the custard into the serving dish.

If you want to use this recipe, but do not have an oven at home, you could also make the custard in a pressure cooker. I found this link on youtube, where the famous chef Sanjeev Kapoor demonstrates how to make caramel custard in a cooker. Sadly, the audio quality of the clip is extremely poor. But you can get a good idea of the preparation method from seeing the video.
Watch it here: