Baking Makes Joy: part 2 (adding the fruit to your flan)

Since this seems to have become, temporarily, a baking blog, here’s what to do with your peach flan once you’ve baked the dough.

Incidentally, this cake has many great features:

1. you can fill it with any kind of fresh fruit, as long as it’s soft enough – besides peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and redcurrants all work well.
2. you can make and bake the dough the day before you plan to eat it (the evening before is often convenient) and then fill it later.
3. you can make the dough and freeze it for up to 3 months before thawing it, rolling it out, etc. and nothing bad happens. So I often make at least a double batch of dough
4. if you are feeding a lot of people, you can triple the dough recipe, and bake it on a cookie sheet (one with a rim works better), for a big huge cake
5. the dough gets pleasantly soggy after the fruit has sat in it for a day or so, so you can plan accordingly depending on your preference for crispy or soggy

Anyways, once you’ve got your baked crust, drain the can of peaches over a colander placed over a bowl to catch the juice. Important: save the juice!

Make up the glaze according to the instructions on the package, using the reserved juice instead of the water called for on the package (or use a combo of water and juice to make up the right volume of liquid). Important: the glaze mix does not itself usually contain sugar, so add about 2-3 tbsp of sugar, depending on whether your peaches were packed in juice or in syrup.

Arrange the peaches in a pleasing pattern on the crust, and then pour over the hot glaze. Let it set for several hours.

Enjoy!

About these ads