vanilla pastry cream

originally posted november 7th, 2022

You may have noticed that a lot of my cakes are filled with some flavor of pastry cream. And, if you watch my Tik Toks where I describe the flavor profiles of a cake, you’ve heard me say “and this is my vanilla pastry cream recipe with ______” or “I do this to my vanilla pastry cream recipe”. Well, this is it, my vanilla pastry cream recipe. I put a lot of time, energy and testing in to perfecting my “base” recipes. This is one of those base recipes, in which I use it as a starting point to build and play around with flavor. As I start developing new flavors and recipes, I use these base recipes as my benchmark of texture and sweetness I like. And so I can make all sorts of adjustments and additions to have consistent mouthfeel across the board.

As I mentioned, I use pastry cream a ton in cakes. But the fun doesn’t stop there- pastry cream Is one of those classic and timeless fillings you can use across the board in pastry. You can use it to fill donuts, tarts, eclairs, cream pies, croissants. etc. Fill with pastry cream to your hearts content baby ♡

There’s also a variety of ways to infuse flavor into pastry cream: by steeping tea leaves or coffee grounds in to the milk, by infusing cereal into the milk, by switching from vanilla to almond extract (or any flavor extract for that matter), using chocolate milk instead of regular, using EGG NOG instead of milk…, adding praline paste to the mix!! If you can dream it- you can probably do it. Even though I have so much faith in you and your ability to be so creative- sometimes there will be fails. There will be mistakes- but that’s a very important part of life and learning. Because while you can have fun with the infusions and inclusions some of them wont be a hit, sometimes you’ll use buttermilk and it will absolutely curdle and separate and be really fucking gross(from personal experience). All apart of the process.

Anyways, enough of my yapping. Let’s get into it.

This recipe makes 750 grams of pastry cream.

Ingredients:

• 305 grams whole milk

• 150 grams heavy cream

• 1/2 a vanilla bean, scraped

• 3/4 teaspoon diamond crystal kosher salt

• 120 grams egg yolks

• 90 grams granulated sugar

• 25 grams cornstarch

• 65 grams butter, cold & cubed

Directions:

1. Place your milk, heavy cream and vanilla into a medium saucepan over medium heat.

2. While that heats up, whisk together your cornstarch, sugar and kosher salt to eliminate any lumps. Add your egg yolks and whisk together until a homogenous paste forms. You’'ll really want to aerate this for about a minute or two- not fully necessary it’ll help the milk mixture to temper in easier in the next step!

3. Once your milk mixture is at a simmer, temper into the yolk mixture. To temper: ladle in a small amount of the hot milk into the yolks, whisking to combine. Add another ladle full and repeat. Do this about 3/4 times before adding the tempered yolk mixture back into the saucepan. You do this to slowly bring the egg yolks up to temp and avoid shocking/scrambling them. If the egg yolks scramble it will leave you with a grainy texture and eggy taste.

4. Once tempered add the egg yolk mixture back into the saucepan.

5. Whisk constantly to avoid scrambling. Continue to whisk until your cream begins to thicken and reaches a soft boil (a few slow popping and thick bubbles will form.)

6. At this point remove your cream from the heat and strain into your desired container. This is the final frontier to make sure you don’t have any scrambled eggy bits in your cream. Add your butter and immersion blend until smooth. If you don’t have an immersion blender you can use a regular blender or just whisk to combine. The immersion blender though leaves you with the most perfect creamy texture.

7. Cover directly with plastic wrap. Label and date the container!

8. Use it how ever you’d like ♡

9. * If you find your PC has set too firm in the fridge, put it in the blender with the paddle to loosen it up a bit. or do it by hand with a spatula *

XOXO ENJOY!! TYSM, KASSIE ♡