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Custard with milk and eggs

Pastry Cream with Milk and Eggs

Wonderfully tender, melts in your mouth, made from the most ordinary ingredients! Pastry cream (custard) with milk and eggs is a classic recipe. It's layered into Napoleon and honey cakes, piped into éclairs and cream horns, and used as a base for ice cream and countless other treats. It's very simple to make if you follow a few rules.

katushafin

Recipe author

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Composition / ingredients

Servings:

Milk

500

Eggs

Flour

Sugar

170

Butter

100

Vanilla sugar

Translation table of volumetric measures

Nutrients and energy value of the composition of the recipe

By weight of the composition:

Proteins 10 % 4 g

Fats 30 % 12 g

Carbohydrates 60 % 24 g

223 kcal

GI: 12 / 4 / 84

Cooking method

Step 1:

How do you make pastry cream with milk and eggs? Gather the ingredients. You can use milk of any fat content — it doesn't matter. I used large eggs. The amount of sugar varies to taste, from 150 to 200 grams; I went with the middle, 170 grams. My vanilla sugar is made with real vanilla, which is why it's so dark and you can see little black flecks in the cream. It's better if the butter is soft, so take it out of the fridge ahead of time.
Step 2:

Use a heavy-bottomed pot. This matters, because a lot in this recipe depends on the cookware. In a heavy-bottomed pot you can safely cook the cream right on the stove, whereas a thin one has to go over a water bath so the mixture doesn't scorch or turn into scrambled eggs. Crack the eggs into the pot, add the plain sugar and vanilla sugar, and add the flour. Whisk all the ingredients together until smooth.
Step 3:

Pour in the milk in a thin stream, whisking constantly. It blends with the other ingredients fairly quickly. Pouring the liquid into the thicker mixture (rather than the other way around) is what keeps lumps from forming.
Step 4:

Set the pot with the milk mixture over low heat. Cook the cream without leaving the stove, whisking the mixture the whole time. This is important, because otherwise the bottom layer heats up faster and more strongly and the eggs curdle, giving you scrambled eggs instead of pastry cream. With constant whisking, all the layers of the cream heat evenly.
Step 5:

Fairly quickly the mixture will start to thicken, more and more by the minute. Wait for it to come to a boil — large bubbles will appear on the surface and it will start to "puff."
Step 6:

As soon as that happens, turn off the heat right away. Leave the pot of cream to cool. Come back now and then and whisk the cream so a skin doesn't form on top.
Step 7:

Cool the cream until it's warm. It should be at a temperature where a finger dipped in feels a pleasant warmth, but not hot. Add the butter to the cream — in cream that's too hot it will melt away, and in cold cream it won't soften at all. The goal is to gently work the butter into the cream until it's fully incorporated.
Step 8:

The finished cream will be perfectly smooth, even, and glossy. Chill it well before using. To keep a thick skin from forming, press a piece of plastic wrap directly onto its surface. Refrigerate the cream for a couple of hours, then use it as intended.

The pastry cream made by this recipe is very tender, moderately sweet, with a pronounced vanilla note. It's great for layering cakes, since it comes out fairly thin. If you want to use it as a filling for pastries, add more butter.
Always wash eggs before using them, since even a shell that looks clean can carry harmful bacteria. It's best to use a food-safe wash and a brush.
For the difference between vanilla, vanillin, vanilla extract, and vanilla sugar, and how to use and substitute them correctly so you don't ruin a dish's flavor, see this article.
Important! To make sure your pastry cream comes out right, follow a few simple rules: — Let the cream base thicken as it cooks (the flour should cook through, but watch that the cream doesn't scorch and that no lumps form). — The cooked flour mixture must cool down; if you add butter to a mixture that's still hot, the butter melts and the cream won't whip up. — Use good-quality butter. Poor butter can hurt the cream's consistency and make it runny.