Creme Patisserie / Pastry Cream

I haven’t written the complete story about Yena’s Princess Cake. The recipe I was mostly following was from Elaine’s blog (browse through, her pics are awesome!) where she’s got a bunch of food posts — she’s quite the baker! I love how she “simplified” the Princess cake process for me — I followed the cake recipe itself and the pastry cream, and winged it on the rest of the stuff (which actually, is what you’re supposed to do, since there’s not much else). The cake was great, though not the best sponge cake I’ve made — it may have been my technique too — shouldn’t be hurrying when you’re making birthday cakes!

The pastry cream didn’t work out for me, though. I was unfamiliar with the cornstarch technique, and undercooked the pastry cream for fear that I would be overcooking it. Elaine after all said “3 or 4 bubbles” somewhere in her instructions. What I should have done, and what I usually do, was trust my own instincts. I still chilled the cream, hoping it would thicken up enough in the fridge, but though it was delicious, it just didn’t have the firmness necessary to hold up as filling for that cake. Silly me, I proceeded to fill the cake anyway.

But by afternoon the day before the party I had to admit that it wasn’t really working, and so I made my tried-and-true creme patisserie, the one that calls for flour, scraped the filling off the cake and basically started over with the filling and frosting. I’ll try the cornstarch method again sometime.

The pastry cream that didn’t work.

My tried-and-true pastry cream, which uses flour — whisking it in.

Wahoo! Ready for chilling and filling.

P.S. Elaine’s “report” on the Princess cake is the most thorough I’ve ever seen on the subject, so if you’re at all interested in the history of this cake, go read it.

PPS If I had known rahka cream was roughly the same thing as quark, I would have bought quark, which is now readily available in the US. Actually, it has been for a while. An avid baker friend uses it in a lot of her recipes, and gets it by the case from the co-op we belonged to way back when. Several ‘net links mentioned while I was doing research for this that quark isn’t available in the US — don’t believe them! Just call around, I guarantee you’ll find it.

PPS — Whoops, the recipe! Let me know if you want mine specifically and I’ll post it. However, I found one that’s very close, except the amounts I made were only for about 1/3 of this one:
Pastry Cream recipe from Tallyrand.