Skip to main content
Dessert

Caramel Cup Custards

Custard cups made with caramelized sugar, eggs, cream, and vanilla, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Caramel Cup Custards

six custard cups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Melt 4 tablespoons of sugar until light brown and pour it into six custard cups, shaking them quickly to coat the sides with caramel.

Make the custard

  1. Beat 3 eggs in a bowl, then add 3 tablespoons of sugar and 1 cup of cream. Mix well.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla to the egg mixture and stir to combine.

  3. Pour the mixture into the cups over the caramel.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the cups in a baking pan filled with hot water and bake for about 15 minutes, or until set.

  2. Turn out the custards while hot onto individual dishes and let them cool.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard into a tender, sliceable structure as they cook.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the custard a smooth, soft texture.
Sugar
Melted to make the caramel and sweetens the custard.

The step that matters

Melt the sugar for the caramel until light brown. Sugar darkens and gains flavour as it caramelises, but it can burn quickly and turn bitter if left too long. Shaking the cups while the caramel is still liquid coats them evenly before it hardens.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes