Sponge Candy

“First you bloat, and then you drop pounds like that… It explains it all on the label.”

                        -- Cady

Julia Child was popular less for her culinary excellence and more for her tendency to fail. Omelets were lost mid flip, fingers were burnt, and as - Dan Aykroyd has pointed out - small cuts were sustained. I’m grandiose enough to fancy myself a future pioneer in culinary education, so I will now compare myself to Julia Child. This post is dedicated to recipes that fail spectacularly. There. I’ve spun this. I’m not admitting to making a hot mess; I have intentionally ruined this dessert as part of a “teachable moment.”

Sponge candy is delicious. As Wikipedia points out, it goes by many names, but the premise is simple and directly related to 3^rd grade science class. Make a dark, toasty sugar syrup (that always goes well) and then add vinegar and baking soda. The mixture foams like crazy and then hardens, trapping millions of crunchy bubbles into a honeycomb.

This is the recipe I used. I cannot recommend it. Sure that opening photo looks okay, but photos can be very flattering taken out of context (i.e., eHarmony profile photos). Let’s take a journey…

Flan

“I can't go to taco bell, I'm on an all-carb diet. *God* Karen, you're so stupid!”

                        -- Regina

Custard at its most basic is eggs and milk. If you’re making dessert custard then you have to bring in some sugar. That’s all it takes to make something velvety and wonderful. Except, not really. Even if the only ingredients were eggs, milk, and sugar, I could write a whole book on exactly what to do with those base materials.

Flan takes things a step further and brings in my culinary nemesis: caramelized sugar. How many pots of crystallized or burnt sugar have lost their lives in my drive to make a toasty sugar syrup? It’s taken me dozens of attempts to figure out the appropriate technique, but melting sugar is clearly a skill that only comes with practice.

This time I’m using an excellent recipe from Rick Bayless. I’m sure it’s perfect made exactly as he specifies, but I’ll never know. I can never make this recipe without feeling compelled to change it; I'll discuss some of those alternations below. Needless to say, this post will be filled with stories about incredibly stupid custard shortcuts I've taken over the years. Don't follow in my footsteps.