Mango Honey Flan with Pomegranate Concentrate

People have varied reactions when they hear the name of my blog. Some ask if all the recipes are made with mangoes and tomatoes: no, that would be slightly crazy. Others instantly ignore tomato and refer to my blog as Mango Tango, which would be cool if I was obsessed with tango dancing and not salsa. Yet one person asked me if my blog's name was really naked tomato. Thank you, Russian accent, which will remain with me till I'm 80 years old and even further.

What can I say? I like mangoes and I like tomatoes, and I thought it'd be a relatively short, catchy and easy to remember name. It's been a while, however, that I've cooked with mangoes. Most of the time I just like eating them peeled and cubed. Then last week I saw a recipe for mango honey flan from Ben of What's Cooking Mexico. I was intrigued and a little scared.

I've had flan many times: some versions are better than others. Some restaurants tend to burn the caramel, others have artificial flavors, and then there was the flan that Kenny made for me: perfection.

The recipe Ben posted had an interesting take: instead of making a caramel-like sauce, you simply coat the pan with honey. I must admit I'm not a huge fan of honey unless it's in a marinade, baked into cakes or a part of a salad dressing, but I was willing to give it a try.

Here's what you do {for complete recipe refer back to Ben's post}

Peel and cube a mango. Hopefully yours will be as juicy and sweet as mine!

Get the rest of your ingredients ready: sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, eggs, cream cheese {make sure the cream cheese is at room temperature}, and vanilla {confession: I forgot vanilla when making my flan}.

If you are like me, it's incredibly important to resist the urge to eat the entire can of sweetened condensed milk with a spoon. I repeat: resist!

While the oven is preheating, simply combine all the ingredients in a blender till smooth. Then, heat up your baking dish {I used a rectangular one} and coat it with honey. Pour the flan mixture into the dish, cover with aluminum foil and then set into a larger baking dish filled with water.

Bake for about an hour. Take out of the oven, cool, and then refrigerate over night. Have I mentioned that I have very little patience for things? Then imagine how hard it was for me to wait to unmold and taste the flan.

I decided to add a little Olga touch to the final dish since I rarely follow a recipe to a t. I had a bottle of POM concentrate that POM Wonderful kindly sent to me to test out. So far I've just been adding it to water, but this time I drizzled it over the flan. The concentrate is smooth, silky and has a touch of sour taste to it: a perfect way to offset the sweetness of the flan.

Thoughts on the flan: it was easier to make than I expected. The flavor was really good, but I wasn't a fan of the texture, which reminded me of ricotta; I wanted something perfectly smooth. I'm not sure if there was something I did wrong...perhaps next time I should strain the flan mixture or use mango nectar instead of the actual fruit?
Still, I'm glad I took a chance, faced my fears and tried something new.

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