Sweet Indulgence: Baked Leche Flan

If you ask any Filipino- what is your favorite native dessert? The answers might be halo-halo, maja blanca, ube... and definitely, leche flan will be part, if not on top, of the list.

I love leche flan. In fact, if I remember correctly, making leche flan was my very first attempt in cooking. I was still in high school then. I didn't have money to buy the ingredients, so I had to make do with what was in the house. Instead of evaporated milk, I used Nido Full Cream Milk. Instead of condensed milk, I used Nido Full Cream Milk with lots and lots and lots of white sugar.

I then steamed the concoction... it did form into a flan, but the taste was very far from the other yummy leche flans I'd tasted. At the end, whenever I wanted to make Nido leche flan, I would put in scoops of Ricoa cocoa powder... only then did my family say that it's good. But still, it was not the original leche flan I wanted to make.

After those several episodes, I didn't attempt to make leche flan for a long time. I don't know, maybe I was traumatized? :P Or maybe I just thought it was time to move on to other desserts.

But once in a while, I still get a craving for leche flan. And it's really expensive to buy leche flan in restaurants! A very small leche flan in Max's Restaurant (the least expensive one among those included in the Top 10 leche flan list) would cost around P50.

So I decided to give leche flan another try. But this time, I wanted it to place it in ramekins to make it more classy. So I googled if I can make leche flan via baking. And as it turned out, yes, I can! :)