This recipe was developed as kind of a “turning lemons into lemonade” scenario.
Spending Christmas on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas is always a special time. However, being on a Bahamian out island means that we don’t always have access to the kind of things you’d find in major supermarkets.
We both love egg nog and when we found some UHT (Ultra High Temperature) egg nog at a local store we thought, “Wow! We lucked out!” Well, the reality was somewhat different. It turns out that using the UHT preserving method doesn’t really work well for egg nog – at least, we didn’t think so.
So, we had a couple of one litre cartons of this egg nog that we didn’t really want to actually drink. So … what to do … what to do …
Light bulb goes on – baked egg custard and substitute the egg nog for the milk in the recipe.
Hey, it was worth a try. We certainly weren’t going to drink the egg nog and we are loathe to throw things out if there’s any way to save them.
So, that’s exactly what we did and it made the creamiest, tastiest egg custard we have ever made. We even served it at our Christmas dinner party to rave reviews!
- In a large bowl with an electric mixer at low speed, beat eggs, salt and sugar until lemon colored.
- Gradually beat in egg nog and vanilla extract.
- Pour mixture into custard cups, put in an oven-proof pan (we use a 13” x 9” glass baking dish) and put hot water in pan up to 1” from top of cups.
- Grate a bit of nutmeg on top of each cup.
- Bake at 320 - 325 deg. F. about an hour – until knife inserted in center comes out clean. We found, with our oven, it took closer to an hour and a half. We started it at 320 deg. but bumped it up to 325 as it wasn’t even close to done after an hour.
- Cool on wire racks and then refrigerate. Serve cold.