In this article I am going to share how you can make your Homemade Vanilla Pastry Cream. It will give the delicious filling to your eclairs and cream puff. Perfect for your afternoon tea time at home or anytime you want a sweet dessert.
What You Will Need
Cream Mixture
1. 2 Vanilla Beans
2. One cup of Milk
3. One cup of Heavy Cream
4. 1/3 cup of Granulated Sugar
5. ¼ teaspoon of salt
Egg Mixture
1. 5 egg yolks (no whites)
2. Three tablespoon of Granulated Sugar
3. Three tablespoon of cornstarch (for thicken)
Finishing
4 tablespoon of softened unsalted butter
How to Make
1. Prepare the vanilla beans. Split them into two and make sure it’s widely open, so that the vanilla seeds can come out. Set the bean aside.
2. Place a medium sized heavy-bottomed saucepan on the stovetop. Add one cup of milk and one cup of heavy cream into the saucepan. Also, add 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, ¼ teaspoon of salt. Put the splitted vanilla beans.
3. Heat to medium, stir pretty frequently until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture comes to a simmer.
4. Remove the saucepan from the heat.
5. Set aside and let it cool for at least 10-15 minutes.
Meanwhile we are going to move over to our egg mixture.
1. Prepare 5 egg yolks (no whites) and pour 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar in. Whisk them together until the sugar is starting to dissolved a little bit. It’s about 15 seconds of whisking.
2. Add 3 tablespoon of cornstarch to thicken up the pastry cream to the egg mixture and continue to whisk.
Combining Cream and Egg Mixture
Then, combine those two mixtures (cream and egg mixture) and you have to be careful because you don’t want to cook the egg, so make sure the cream mixture is cooled down. With a cup, just scoop it and pour the cream mixture into the egg mixture and slowly drizzle it. Do it twice and after that you can just pour all of the cream and mix them well. At this time, don’t take the vanilla beans yet.
Pour back in the egg and cream mixture into the saucepan. The reason why we do this back and forth is because we need to slowly introduce the cream to the egg mixture so we don’t cook the egg. Put the saucepan back to stovetop and turn on medium heat. Whisk until the mixture is thicken and we got the pudding consistency. Once it thicken, remove from heat.
Next, strain the pastry cream. The cream is pretty thick so you will need spatula to make the mixture go down. And the vanilla beans will get left behind, we don’t need it anymore at this time. After done whisking, add 4 tablespoon of softened unsalted butter. Add one tablespoon at a time and whisk it well.
While it’s still warm, wrap it with plastic wrap and let it cool down until reach the room temperature. After that, put in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before it ready to use.
DONE!