members recipes

One of our regional dishes is thick vegetable soup with this damson flan, coming right out of the oven! This flan is one of my favourite sweet treats, and it only takes a couple of ingredients, too. There might be some damsons left over, in this case cut them half-through, remove the stone and replace it with two sugarcubes. (Freeze them and) use them for the \"baked damsons in sweet pizza dough\" or for the \"sweet dumplings\", also on foodwise.

Ingredients
500 g flour
20 g fresh yeast
2 tblsp caster sugar
1 large egg
half a tblsp full of soft butter
1 tsp salt
250 ml lukewarm milk
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2,5 kilo damsons
powder sugar
caster sugar
cinnamon

Method
Pour 450 g flour in a bowl and make a little hollow. Put the yeast in a mug with warm milk and sugar, stir until yeast has dissolved and pour the liquid into the hollow. Cover the bowl with a clean towel and leave to rest at a warm place for at least 20 minutes.

Add the egg, butter and salt and knead a dough until it starts to blister. You might need to add the rest of the flour in case the dough is too soggy, it depends on the flour you use.

Cover the bowl again and leave until the dough has doubled in size.

In the meantime, prepare the damsons. Cut them halfway through, remove the stone and flatten them a bit so you´ve got two ovals connected. Now take your knife and cut the ovals a bit more than halfway through in the middle (lengthwise) from one end, do the same with the connection of the two halves, but from the bottom up. This way you do get a nice flat damson. I will post a photo of how it should look like and put the link in here.

Preheat the oven to 225°C.

Roll out the pizza dough thinly and place it on the baking tray (it doesn´t need any fat!). Place the prepared damsons on the dough, make sure they overlap each other by at least a third! Sprinkle the damsons with a little powder sugar and bake the flan in the oven for about 25 to 30 minutes. It´s ready when the bottom of the dough has a nice colour (you do check on it like you would on a pizza).

As soon as it´s finished, take it out of the oven and instantly sprinkle it with some caster sugar, mixed with cinnamon.

It tastes best when still warm. You can serve it to veg soup (recipy up soon), or as a sweet treat like it is, with whipped cream or ice cream.

The photo shows a flan I have made in a pizza tray (28cm in diameter), the dough and damsons should be enough for 3 of these trays.