The Hunger Games: Honey Caramel Custard For Your Honey

Honey Caramel Custard For Your Honey

“The top splits and from below rises a second tabletop that holds our lunch.  Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the color of honey.” – The Hunger Games, Chapter 5

I have never made custard before.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever tried custard before.  So everything about this recipe was new to me.

Also, I would like to point out that pudding and custard are not the same thing, so I’m not sure why the author of this cookbook decided to turn this into a custard instead of sticking with pudding.  Pudding is thickened with cornstarch, while custard is thickened with egg.

I started off by combining whipping cream and honey in a pot over the stove, and bringing it to a simmer.

Separately, I beat together egg yolks, vanilla, sugar, honey, and salt.  Then the cream/honey mixture was added in slowly.

Everything was poured into an 8×8 inch pan, which was then put into a 13×9 inch pan.  The 13×9 inch was filled with water around the 8×8, to about 1 inch, and then everything was put into the oven for an hour.

Once the custard was cooked through, I let it cool on a cooling rack for about 30 minutes before refrigerating it overnight.

About 30 minutes before I was ready to serve it, I removed the custard from the fridge, sprinkled it with brown sugar, and then broiled it for 2 minutes until the brown sugar melted.

Or at least that’s what I was supposed to do.  For some reason our oven knob got stuck and wouldn’t let me set it to broil, so I ended up heating it at the highest possible temperature for about 6 minutes.  At that point the custard started re-cooking, so I removed the custard before the brown sugar was completely melted.

Then it went into the fridge for another 30 minutes before we tried it.

I’m not sure if the texture was quite right, since I’ve never had it before.  I always imagined it would be more solid for some reason.  This one was kind of like cream cheese.

Taste: 8/10

The taste was very sweet, and I actually liked this quite a bit!  I had some trouble moving past the texture, though, so my husband ended up eating most of it.

Difficulty: Average-Challenging

This recipe is somewhere between average and challenging.  It was certainly not the most difficultly I’ve had putting a recipe together, but it did require frequent monitoring and a lot of different steps.

Cost: Cheap

Biggest purchase here was whipping cream.  The rest is honey, eggs, vanilla, sugar, and brown sugar.  I already had all of these items in my pantry/fridge already.