Crème Caramel

I'm not sure why, but until I started making crème caramel, I honestly didn't like it very much. I sound a little weird and quite shallow when I say this, but I think the appearance of crème caramel put me off more than anything. It just didn't look "pretty" to me and it's sad to say that I shunned this poor dessert. =P Instead, I much rather preferred its "cousin", crème brûlée… now *that* is a beautiful dessert. Ok one final thing I want to say (before you decide to ship me off to the funny farm) is that I've had a change of heart and I do appreciate crème caramel now.

Anyway this recipe comes from the "hit and miss" book 曲奇蛋糕cook得起 2 that I used to make the shell cookies.  I made this dessert twice and both times I had to bake it longer than the stated one hour. I really have a big fear of undercooking eggs and I don't think my guinea pigs would appreciate getting food poisoning… =P At the same time, one of my guinea pigs almost had a heart attack when he realized how many eggs went into making this dessert. Oops… well sometimes sharing recipes may not be a good thing. =P

To test whether it was done, I shook the container to see how much the dessert wiggled. When it stopped jiggling like jello then I felt comfortable enough to take it out of the oven. Both times I ended up baking it so long that I overcooked the side of it which did not have caramel. I think what I might try next time is to cover it with tinfoil so that hopefully it can prevent the mixture from overcooking and getting hard on one side.

Ingredients:
Pudding:
500g milk
175g sugar
375g eggs (I used 7 eggs)
250g whipping cream

Caramel:
100g sugar
1 tsp water

Method:

1. Prepare the caramel first. Place 100g sugar and drinking water in a stainless steel mixing bowl.
2. Heat over medium heat until sugar dissolves to a dark brown liquid. Stir constantly.
3. Arrange pudding moulds on baking tray. Pour a thin layer of caramel (2) into the moulds. Set aside.
4. Mix milk with 175g of sugar. Set aside.
5. Beat eggs with an electric mixer.
6. Pour in whipping cream and mix well with the electric mixer.
7. Pour in (4) milk mixture and mix well with the electric mixer.
8. Sieve (7) egg mixture and pour into (3) pudding moulds.
9. Pour hot water in the baking tray. The height of the water should be the same as the caramel in the baking moulds.
10. Bake at 140C/285F for 1 hour.
11. Let cool and invert pudding onto a serving plate.