Toasted Hazelnut and Salted Caramel Flan Parisien

Aka Heaven in a slice

How do you take a classic and give it a makeover without changing it beyond recognition, giving it a new set of clothes without changing its entire personality. I love this weeks classic flan parisien, the simplicity of it is part of what makes its special and what makes it so comforting. But like everything else, I cant help but have a little play around and give it a twist. Keeping it within the world of French pastry I decided to concentrate of caramel flavours, mainly because I had an idea I wanted to try out; caramel pastry cream.

I have made caramel ice cream many times in the past and the way I make it is to simply caramelise the sugar that is used in the ice cream custard; its like making a salted caramel sauce but with a different ratio of liquid to sugar and using both milk and cream. If you can make an ice cream custard this way what would a pastry cream taste like? I took the sugar for the pasty cream, melted and caramelised it and then added the cream and milk. I used this caramel infused mixture to make the pastry cream and then the flan. On my first test, the result looks a whole lot more caramel-esque but the flavour wasn’t as strong as it could be. The main reason for this is that the custard used in a flan Parisian is just not that sweet, so the caramel flavour was a little muted. To improve upon this I did two things, upped the sugar slightly and more importantly added a layer of actual caramel. Before the pastry cream was added to the blind baked flan case I spread in layer of salted caramel mixed with chopped hazelnuts. I added the custard on top and baked as I would normally. Disaster ensued. The caramel got too hot during the long baked and it bubbled up the side and over the pastry. It looked quite the mess but it did taste incredible. The main issue, other than its terrible look, was that the caramel overcooked in the oven becoming a little too chewy. To correct that, on the third and final version of the flan I stopped trying to be clever and simply added the caramel on top of the flan after it had baked. The texture was much better, as was the look.