Egg flan is a dessert with nowhere to hide. Six ingredients, none of them expensive, none of them exotic. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong in the technique, not in the shopping list. Which is why the recipe from Saúl Craviotto, the Olympic canoeist and cookery show winner, is worth reading to the end - he adds nothing, he simply does not rush.

The ingredients are six eggs, half a litre of whole milk, two hundred grams of sugar, one cinnamon stick, the zest of one lemon, plus forty grams of sugar with two tablespoons of water for the caramel. That is all.

The first step is the one most people skip. The milk is heated with the lemon zest and cinnamon until it boils, then taken off the heat and cooled completely. Not lukewarm. Completely. If hot milk is poured over the eggs, you get scrambled eggs that smell of cinnamon, and there is no going back.

The eggs and the two hundred grams of sugar are mixed without vigorous whisking. Air bubbles are not wanted - they later make the texture full of holes. The cooled milk is strained to remove the cinnamon and zest, added to the eggs, and then stirred by hand until the mixture is uniform.

The caramel is made separately: forty grams of sugar with two tablespoons of water in a non-stick pan, taken to a dark amber colour. It goes straight into the mould, which is then swirled to coat both the base and the sides. Here you are working in seconds - caramel left half a minute longer than needed turns bitter.

The mixture goes into the mould, the mould goes into a dish of water, and all of it into the oven at a hundred and sixty degrees for forty-five to fifty minutes. The water bath is not decoration and not an old habit - it is the only reason the flan bakes evenly instead of setting on the outside while the middle is still liquid. You check with a toothpick: if it comes out clean, it is done.

And the last part, the one that makes half of all people give up: the flan must cool completely, then rest in the fridge, and only then be turned out. With one decisive movement, not with hesitation. A warm flan turned out falls apart, and no amount of skill saves it. That willingness to wait is the entire difference between a homemade dessert and a dessert that looks like somebody who knows what they are doing made it.