The Best Flancocho Ever — Chocolate Cake + Flan
- November 2021
- By Rose Rosario
- Recipe from Dominican Republic
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- (18)
Flancocho is the choco-licious creamy dessert of our Latino dreams. It’s half flan, half chocolate cake or bizcocho (which is how you get the word: flan-cocho), and 100% delicioso. This combo postre marries two of our all-time favorites, and it is a new classic we’ll be making all year (and for birthdays and even Christmas!).
That’s how good it is.
If your Instagram feed is anything like ours, you’ve been seeing a flood of flancochos lately, and we are here for it. Except, traditionally this two-for-one dessert is made with vanilla cake. And vanilla is good, but chocolate is even better, right? Let’s give chocolate some flancocho love this holiday.
Beginning with this flancocho, which calls for chocolate cake mix. And not just any mix. The most famoso of all chocolate bizcocho mixes in our humble Latino opinion: Dominican cake mix from the legendary Angela’s Bakery. (See our unboxing of this bizcocho mix here.) But you can use any chocolate box mix and it comes out delicioso!
If you are from the D.R. you know: Dominican cake is famous for being light as air, with a meringue layer called suspiro on top. And if you live near New York City, then you really know: the place to buy el mejor and most auténtico Dominican cake in the triborough area is at a neighborhood store in Brooklyn called Angela’s Bakery. The shop is named after its gifted Dominican home cook/owner who turned her baking side hustle into a sweets hub for the Latino community in 2003. For those of us not in New York, Angela’s makes a Dominican cake box mix we can mail-order to get the bakery’s signature sabor in our own cocina.
We called Angela’s Bakery to ask about flancocho and — no sorpresa — they are on it. Turns out they’ve been experimenting with this custardy take on cake and loving the results.
”A little while ago, my brother’s friend asked me: ’Have you ever had flancocho?’ And honestly, I hadn’t,” says Angela’s daughter, Rose, who has been running the bakery since Angela retired a few years ago. ”‘You have to try it!’ he told us.”
Rose may not have known what flancocho was then, but this she knew, immediately: “I love flan. When I talk about flan, my mouth starts to water.” Rose and her family had to try it. Her brother’s friend came over and with Rose and the shop crew, they started baking. They used her mother Angela’s family-famous flan recipe and mixed it with the shop’s proprietary Dominican chocolate box mix.
The results? Flantástico, Rose reports. ”Oh my god, it was rico, rico, rico,” she says. ”The chocolate and the caramel are so good together.”
Dominican Cook Belqui Makes her First Flancocho!
To check out Angela’s Bakery flancocho in time for the holiday baking season, we decided to try it for ourselves here at Familia Kitchen. We immediately thought of one of our favorite Dominican home cooks Belqui Ortiz-Millili of the cooking blog Belqui’s Twist. For her next Belqui’s Twist video, could she — an admitted non-baker — bake this flancocho with Angela’s personal family flan recipe and Dominican chocolate mix?
Belqui said yes. But, she confessed: She was pretty nervous.
”It was a bit intimidating because Dominican cake is not the simplest to make. I consider myself a cook, by the way: Not a baker. But there are no other Dominican cake mixes on the market, which makes this a truly one-of-a-kind product. I am an only-Dominican-cake fan, so I have never made a boxed cake before. I have had zero interest in it,” Belqui admits.
But because Belqui and her family are big flan fans, she decided to push through her jitters. She was soon in her kitchen, whipping up flan and mixing cake batter, following the recipe Angela’s Bakery sent.
Thankfully, Belqui reported, ”the instructions did give me peace of mind as a non-baker. Before I started making this flancocho, I couldn’t comprehend how the flan and the chocolate cake stayed in their own layers, separate from each other, throughout the baking process. I was dumbfounded when I saw that the flan and the chocolate cake did just that. It was like, ’I go here and you go there.’”
And then, when she made it and realized they really do stay apart, each in their own half of the flancocho mold, she was delighted, says Belqui. ”Wow! Seriously mind blown, not just by that, but also by how delicious it is. The flan and chocolate cake mix complement each other perfectly.”
So perfectly that Belqui the non-baker is now Belqui the baker, at least when it comes to flancocho, she says. “I am now planning Thanksgiving with flancocho as one of the desserts! That says it all.”
Ready to Try Angela’s Family Recipe for Flancocho?
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This is the best dessert i have ever, ever eaten!
We have to agree with you! Best we’ve ever eaten, too. We made it for the first time since it was sent to us yesterday morning and served it to friends last night. They could not stop telling us how much they loved it. The dark, rich, airy chocolate makes the sweet, rum-flavored flan even more delicious tasting.
Delicious!
Looks yummy.