![choco flan choco flan](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MDuj4jg8hWE/maxresdefault.jpg)
When he moved from the Los Angeles area to Northern California for school, he was far from real Mexican food and missed homecooked meals, and discovered, to his delight, that he could make chiles rellenos just because he’d watched his mom make them so many times, even though her instructions were just “add a little of this and that” (something familiar to so many of us). They mined sea salt, made cheese, had a taco cart, cooked for parties, and even have a makeshift restaurant in their backyard. Food wasn’t just nourishment, but his mother’s family’s livelihood. He talks about his parents’ enchantment with the American dream, but that achieving was, at times, a distant reality as they struggled to find enough work to succeed.
![choco flan choco flan](https://i.redd.it/jojbq9dshqm51.jpg)
Castillo talks about growing up going back and forth in his early years between California and Colima, Mexico, where his parents are from, and also Cuyutlán, a beach town on the Pacific coast, where he has family too. Despite its cheerful appearance, it doesn’t skip the biographical and historical stories that, for me, makes a cookbook worth curling up with. It’s perfect.Ī little more about the book: Chicano Eats is a vibrant cookbook that celebrates Mexican cuisine from a Mexican-American lens. Maybe it’s the specificity of calling for “Diamond Crystal kosher salt” in them, and not just “salt” (because good recipe writers know that no two salts are the same), the inclusion of weights and other details that suggest he really pays attention to grit of recipe development, or the simplicity of a reverse-creamed cake, but it imbued with me with confidence and the proof is in the… chocoflan. I had never never made one before this week because I was sure I’d mess it up in some way - I don’t have a great track record with flans, or bundts, and water baths are a level of fiddly I am happy to leave to the people with patience for them - but when I saw this one in Esteban Castillo’s first cookbook, Chicano Eats: Recipes from My Mexican-American Kitchen, I suddenly felt the confidence to make it. I’ve read that this is because the cake, as it rises in the oven, becomes lighter than the flan layer, so the flan sinks and I, a non-scientist, based on little more than liking the sound of it, have concluded that it makes total sense. Once you invert it out of the baking pan, you end up with the flan on top and the cake underneath. Even though it goes into the oven with the cake batter in first and the flan in second, as it bakes, the batters flip. They’re considered a bit magical, not only because they combine two of the most wonderful desserts in the world, but because of what happens in the oven. Chocoflans, sometimes called impossible flan (pastel imposible), are one part flan (a sweetened egg custard with caramel or dulce de leche) and one part plush chocolate cake. If not, let this post fix your suggestions right now. If you spend any time on Pinterest or Instagram food searches, and who that hangs out here does not, I bet at least once in the last couple years, your Explore tab led you to the photogenic, decadent world of chocoflans.