Yema (Custard Candy)

We are coming to the end of the alphabet for the Alphabakes challenge and there are only a few letters left - which seem to be the hard ones! My co-host Ros has chosen the letter Y this month and I immediately thought of yogurt - which I think will be most people's entry this month! So I wanted to see if I could find something a bit different, and after a little Googling came up with ..... yema.

Yema is a traditional Filipino sweet made from condensed milk and egg yolks, and sometimes flavoured with crushed peanuts. I used this recipe that I found online; it only uses two ingredients, condensed milk and egg yolks. It didn't give a size for the tin of condensed milk so I did this a little through trial and error. I had three quarters of a tin of condensed milk in the fridge left over from another recipe, which would be about 300g. I initially used three egg yolks then added a fourth.

The recipe I used told me to heat the condensed milk and egg yolks in a bain marie, but no matter how long I boiled the water for, the mixture would not thicken, even after I added the fourth egg yolk. So I transferred the mixture straight to a saucepan and brought it back to the boil, stirring, and found it thickened very quickly.

 

When the mixture was really stodgy I left it to cool and then rolled small balls of the mixture.

I decided not to add any other flavours like crushed peanuts but I did want to jazz the sweets up a little bit. I had a container of yellow and orange sprinkles in the cupboard with different sections and I used the remainder of it up for this recipe. I poured the sprinkles into a bowl and rolled the yema in it, then refridgerated them overnight.

These were incredibly sweet but pretty good - you wouldn't want to eat more than one at a time but they are easy to make and fun as well. And it's definitely an unusual Y entry for Alphabakes!