When it wasn’t chocolate or ice cream, as an extrovert teenager my turn to dessert was custard. This was a pretty easy pudding to conjure up - freely available at any supermarket or grocery store, all you needed was a couple of other ingredients and voila! The dessert of the day was created. But I must (shamefully) admit that it was only until very recently that I ceased using packeted custard. One fine rainy day, on a whim (mostly because I was bored) I thought I must make custard from scratch and I did. Thanks to (my favourite search engine) Google I formulated the ideal custard recipe. It’s ridiculously convenient because it takes a surprisingly small amount of time to prepare and you use ingredients already available in your kitchen (the perfect pudding to serve to those unexpected callers).

It may be simple, but serve this with some strawberry halves and witness this homemade simplicity convert to runway chic instantly. YUM!

Ingredients

1 cup of milk
¼ cup of sugar
3 eggs
2 ½ tsp of vanilla essence
¼ tsp of salt
Cinnamon powder
Hot water

Directions

Preheat oven to 170 Celsius.

Pour the milk in to her a heavy based saucepan.

Add sugar, vanilla and salt in to it.

Place the pan on a low heat and stir until the sugar has melted.

Once all the ingredients are well incorporated, take the milk mixture of the heat.

Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl.

Whilst whisking the eggs, pour in the milk mixture, little at a time.

Once the entire milk mixture has been poured in to the whisked eggs, add a dash of cinnamon and whisk (briskly) the entire concoction for a few minutes.

Pour the mixture in to ramekins and sprinkle a little cinnamon powder on top.

Place the ramekins in deep baking dish and put it in the oven.

Carefully, pour in hot water (from a freshly boiled kettle) in to the baking dish until it covers half the ramekins height.

Bake for 20 – 25 minutes.

Disasters, Warnings and Tips

Serve this delicious custard with some raisins or strawberries.

When taking out the baking dish + puddings after baking, BEWARE of scalding water.

This particular list of ingredients is sufficient to make three ramekins of custard.

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Ramekins aren’t necessary, if you prefer a regular bowl - go ahead and use it.

Enrich your custard by adding a couple of cardamoms when boiling the milk.

Hot water and a hot oven is a risky combo. To avoid painful accidents - after baking the puddings, leave the oven door fully open for ten minutes and then take it out. (Letting both the oven, puddings and baking dish cool down a bit)

I love my ramekins. They are so cute!

By Shazzana Hamid