Custard bites

By Perry Washburn

Dilemma: Company coming for dinner. Accomplished cooks, each bringing a dish. Southern food on the menu. I am making "smothered chicken," a Southern-inspired dish that I made up on the fly. Others are bring cheesey grits, collards, black-eyed pea salad, corn bread. But no one has chosen dessert.

I am WHIPPED. Out of time. Bread pudding? No. I have a great original recipe for Buttermilk Praline Pie. Some friends call this "Slice of Heaven." :) But it takes about 3 hours to make.

What to do?

What if I made small custard bites? I love the custard and custard pies my grandmothers' generation used to make. Part of my "Heaven" is essentially a custard layer. And to make them "light" after a heavy meal, I'll make them in my silicone mini-muffin pan.

So, here's what I did, after consulting my custard layer recipe and comparing with an old custard pie recipe in a 1940s cookbook Kath gave to Carolyn recently.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees

3 eggs
1/2 cup brown sugar
dash of salt
2 Tbs of buttermilk powder
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp vanilla
4 oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup milk
2 Tbs flour
Pecans
Brown sugar to sprinkle

(I always have buttermilk powder around. It would probably work fine to omit the powder and ad a dash more flour, or substitute real buttermilk for the powder and the milk.)

Beat the eggs, and beat in the remaining ingredients except pecans and remaining brown sugar.
Spray the muffin pan (mine has 24 mini muffins in the sheet). Place a pecan half in each mini muffin cup. Fill 2/3 full with custard; the pecan will float. Sprinkle with a little brown sugar. It will sink, but it's ok.

Bake for 3 minutes at 450. Turn down to 325, and bake a few minutes more, until the custard is puffy and browning. Cool on a rack. I then threw my whole sheet in the fridge for about 2 hours.

After dinner I popped them out of the pan (silicone is great, because you can run a knife easily around the edge). Put them on the plate, act like this is an old family recipe from the Deep South. Yum!

Makes 24.