Experimental Custard

I felt like having a hot sweet drink last night, but I've been really overdoing hot chocolate lately and I'm bored with trying to dress it up, so I thought I'd experiment a bit.

"What if custard, but as a beverage?" I asked myself. A cursory search revealed that this was not exactly a revolutionary concept, but it did mostly turn up Southern Christmas recipes that seemed to fall into a couple categories: recipes to feed 12, with booze in them, or recipes that were "healthy" and did not have heavy cream. I decided to just wing it instead since I only wanted to make about two servings. Here's what I ended up doing.

Custard, But You Drink It

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 tbsp granulated sugar
• nutmeg, freshly grated, to taste (I used something in the ballpark of 1/4 tsp, with a little extra sprinkled on at the end)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 egg, beaten

1. Combine the milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, and grated nutmeg in a saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
2. While the mixture heats, in a small bowl lightly beat the whole egg.
3. When the mixture has come to a simmer, temper the egg by adding in 1/4 cup of mixture, 1 tbsp at a time, stirring continuously.
4. Strain the egg mixture into the pan with the rest of the mix and cook a further 5 or so minutes over medium heat, stirring continuously, until it's thickened up a bit.
5. Let it cool a little and decant into two cups or mugs - whatever you'd use for hot chocolate.

Makes two servings.

Things I'd change: It was 9 pm and I did not feel like separating an egg. It turned out fine, but I probably should have gone ahead and separated the egg and just used the yolk. Straining the egg into the mix was sort of sloppy and produced a drink that was mostly free of lumps, but not ideal. If I did this again I'd use an egg yolk, temper it, and strain the mix at the end of cooking, like you normally would with custard.

The flavor profile was also very simple and I felt it could have used a little something. Realistically whatever would work in custard normally would work well here. Maybe a little orange peel and cinnamon?

Flash Archival Efforts

And here's some cool stuff! Flash is dead at the end of this year, which I could spend a lot of words on getting upset about here- nothing quite fills the same niche Flash held, and that's a lot of information that's going to lapse into being less available. People are making some strong efforts at preservation, though. Here's a couple.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection

Homestuck's archives have been lapsing into disrepair over the last couple years, and as with other webcomics that mix media formats or rely heavily on specific browser functionality / plugins, it's likely to decay further over time without intervention. Twitter user @bamboshu has compiled a really impressive offline Homestuck archive, complete with customized browser for viewing.

I'm excited about this one because they've really gone the extra mile on it. A stable archive of Homestuck itself with the flashes all intact would be useful enough, but this archive collection has hauled in a lot of the outlying content that provided context for Homestuck. Some if it was ephemeral even at the time of release (the goddamn Snapchats, Namco High which vanished like faerie gold, etc). I've been thinking of Homestuck as an archival nightmare for years at this point, because so much of it required being there as it happened. This archive takes steps to present it in a format closer to how it actually played out, vs the raw archives.

BlueMaxima's Flashpoint

Flashpoint focuses on the preservation of Flash games and animations, and offers both an archival "download the whole huge thing" option and a more accessibly-sized download that will dynamically load in games as you browse them. They've got platforms other than Flash, too: they even have those PopCap freeware games that had a bespoke plugin.