Back to Basics (Pastry Cream).

I'm going to share with you some of the basics I learned in Intro to Baking.

Pastry cream is such an important basic to know in patisserie. It's very very basic, so if you wanted, you could add chocolate, coffee, liqueurs -it can be transformed! It's used to fill cakes,  pastries, you can really get creative with it. It's also easily made into diplomat (a 50/50 mix of whipped cream & pastry cream). We used diplomat in class to fill strawberry shortcake. We had a nice layer of diplomat with fresh chopped strawberries in it. Yum!

Yup yup pastry cream, it's easy to make. All you really need to know is how to temper something. Tempering goes a little like this: you heat liquid over the stove in a saucepan and in a separate bowl you have some eggs or egg yolks (maybe mixed with other things, depending on what you're making). You need to slooowly stream in about half of the hot liquid into the eggs while mixing. Then you can add the egg/milk mix back with the rest of the hot milk. It can go back on the heat now. It's like you want the eggs and milk to reach an equilibrium so that the eggs don't cook (yuck, scrambled eggs). Yeah, so that's tempering. Easy peasy.

Creme Patisserie (Pastry Cream)

Ingredients: 
2 C milk
2 oz sugar

2 oz sugar
1.5 oz cornstarch
1 egg yolk
3 whole eggs

1.5 t vanilla extract
1 oz butter

Procedure: 

1. Prep an ice bath: you need two bowls, one larger than the other. Fill the large bowl with some ice  and rest the smaller bowl inside over the ice. Also have plastic wrap ready. 
2. In a medium saucepan, heat milk & sugar. Heat until you see steam, mix the milk so it doesn't burn. 
3. In a medium sized bowl, sift sugar and cornstarch into the eggs and mix together. 
4. When the milk is hot, temper it into the eggs (~1/2-1/3 of the milk).
5. Return the mix back into the pot with remaining milk & put back on the heat (medium/high heat). Continuously mix until it thickens. This should only take a few minutes. 
6. Remove from the heat and mix in vanilla & butter. 
7. If the pastry cream is lumpy, you can strain it. Strain it into the prepared bowl in the ice bath. 
8. Immediately cover the surface with plastic wrap so that a skin doesn't develop on the pastry cream. Make sure it's chilled in an ice bath. 

Viola! Simple, right? Now all you need is some pate choux and you've got eclairs or cream puffs  ;)