The Microwave in the Asylum

     In the spirit of the recent Cinco de Mayo, I decided to make the Mexican custard, flan, for our small group gathering that evening. Since flan is normally baked in a water bath, and I have a couple other recipes that turn out in the microwave without the water bath, I found a microwave flan recipe to try. Either the recipe submitter's microwave has low wattage or she herself does. For one thing, the 9 inch pie plate it was to cook in was too small for the filling. But since I had already poured the caramelized sugar topping into the pie plate, I put the excess filling in a separate bowl. Which did not matter because both the pie plate and the bowl spewed their filling using the cook times she suggested. Which figures because by the time the caramelized sugar bubbled around the edges of the pan, like in her recipe, the sugar underneath had overcooked and would not have loosened from the bottom of the pie plate with anything less than an atomic blast. But since most of the filling had already spewed all over my microwave turntable, there was little reason to try to keep the caramel and filling together.

    I scraped the far flung flan into a bowl. It looks like somebody already ate it once, but tastes pretty good. And I managed to get the caramelized sugar out of my pie plate by letting it soak with hot water and a fabric softener sheet.  Although if that had not worked, I was willing to declare it a casualty of the recipe. Fortunately, I had other desserts besides the floundered flan to serve our small group. And when I need a glucose fix, I slurp a swig of lumpy flan from its bowl in the refrigerator. Apparently, the microwave in the asylum where the submitter lives has lower wattage than mine.