Daily Archives: January 12, 2009

Pastry Cream.  What I remember most about making pastry cream in culinary school was being totally stressed out by it – and everyone else being stressed about it too.  I know that we made it, and that it tasted phenomenal, but somehow the stress turned into some sort of fear that it wouldn’t turn out if I made it at home.  That it would take forever, or curdle, or burn, or do something strange that I would never recover from.  Something like that.  But you know what? It was, well, easy!  The milk came to a simmer just fine, the eggs were tempered just fine, and then it only took about 5 minutes for the mixture to thicken and turn to a nice, thick, smooth custard.  Half was saved as vanilla to make a Boston Cream Pie for Welcome to Woodlands, and the other half was mixed with some chocolate to make a Triple Chocolate Cream Cake for our friend Lincoln’s birthday.  And oh, the taste, the mouth-feel, the fresh vanilla bean smell.  Won-Der-Ful.  

I got an email from Jenn a couple of days ago, saying that this might be the recipe that she would actually try baking.  After several emails back and forth it was decided that I would bake them, but that she would come over and keep me company during the process.  It turns out it is a pretty good “visiting” type of cookie to bake.   You mix up the dough, then stick it in the fridge (and sit down and talk), then it goes from the fridge to the oven (again, opportunity to sit and talk), then allow it to cool (insert sitting and talking here), and then cut it and bake it again.  End result being lots of sitting and talking and some incredibly yummy, fragrant, not overly crunchy biscotti.  And actually, about halfway through the afternoon Jenn had to take her daughter to play practice, but they made sure to stop by afterwards to try some of the results of the day.   By the way, I ran into some dried Mission  ”Figlets” at Woodman’s, and that is what “we” used.  Well, and you can see that I drizzled them with a little bit of melted Ghirardelli double chocolate.  I’ll definitely be making these again!