Croque en Bouche Part 1: Crème Pâtissière (pastry cream)

Here’s part 1 of my big comeback challenge! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go ahead and take a look at the previous post. To start off with, we’re making our pastry cream, or as the french like to call it crème pâtissière. (I’m not the biggest fan of the French language, I do like it more since I stopped having it in school so I apologize if you catch me using too much french words). There are about a billion different ways of making this, I’m showing you my way, which is a slight variation on the original recipe I found. Don’t worry, it turned out great! 😉

Ingredients

• 1 l whole milk
• 1 vanilla pod
• 100 g flower, sieved
• 5 tbsp sugar
• 1 packet vanilla sugar (about 8g)
• 4 eggs

Method

• Put the milk in a large sauce pan.
• Cut the vanilla pod in half (lengthwise), scrape out the seeds with the blunt side of your knife and add it to the milk. For extra flavour, you can add the emptied pods to the milk as well. Bring the milk to a slow simmer. Give it a whisk now and then.
• While your milk is simmering, whisk together your flower, sugar, vanilla sugar and eggs until you get a smooth texture.
• When you think the milk is ready, take out the emptied pods  and poor the milk onto your egg mixture. Make sure your whisking while doing this, we don’t want to cook the eggs!
• Transfer the mixture back to the sauce pan and bring it to a short boil, while whisking vigorously (you don’t want it to burn).
• When you cream has been brought to a boil, turn of the heat and let it cool. While it’s cooling it will continue to thicken so don’t worry if you think it’s slightly to liquid.

TIPS

• You can replace the vanilla pod by some vanilla aroma (not essence!)
• You can spike your cream with some extra flavour, I used a shot of rum but you can use coffee, toffee, chocolate (although this will change the color), orange blossem water,… go ahead and experiment some!
• When you’re letting the cream cool down, you can press some plastic wrap on it so it won’t create a milk-skin.

Check out the slideshow for step-by-step instructions!

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