I still remember the most delicious forget-my-name leche flan I’d ever tasted: it was made from duck eggs and condensed milk. It barely quivered when I spooned out a bit – so dense was it from the milk, and it shone like sunlight from all the egg yolks it contained. Mercy me. The taste is still ingrained on my mind’s palate four years later.

Some time ago, my friend scored some duck eggs at the weekend market and gave them to me. Since SHF was coming up, I thought to use the eggs in this month’s theme, which fatefully, is custard. Ta-ding! An attempt to re-create the leche flan of my dreams.

Leche flan is a Filipino custard made from egg yolks and/or eggs, milk, and sugar. Either steamed or baked, there are innumerable ways to make this popular dessert. It looks and tastes like crème brulée with a few exceptions, one of which is that a leche flan is baked/steamed in an oval mold called a llanera/lyanera (lya-ner-AH) that has been lined with caramelized sugar. Since I didn’t have a llanera, I used an aluminum loaf pan.

Although I’ve been eating leche flan since I was a kid, this was the first time I’d attempted to make it. I was surprised at the diversity in ingredients and techniques in the recipes that I found: some used all egg yolks, others a mixture of yolks and whole eggs; various kinds of milk were used: from fresh milk to condensed milk to evaporated milk. In the end, I made my own recipe by pulling together the components I did like from the other recipes.

Since I was looking to make a custard that was silky smooth and denser than it was light, I chose to make my leche flan with all egg yolks and full cream milk. I also chose to bake my leche flan in a water bath instead of steaming it. Steaming cuts the cooking time by half, but it also tends to produce a custard with large holes and a somewhat cobbled texture.

Unmolding the leche flan onto a plate after it’s been baked requires dexterity and a lot of wishful thinking: I wish that this flan will pop out of the pan without breaking… I wish… I wish. I was somewhat successful, although my flan did break a bit.

The result? I’m happy with my first attempt at one of my favorite Filipino desserts, though it wasn’t as dense as I would’ve liked. There are a whole host of things I’ll do differently next time, but for now, this custard was flan-tastic!

Addtional info:
–Check out the round up of this month’s Sugar High Friday – Cooking Up Custard
–Many thanks to Elise of Simply Recipes