We wanted to do cream puffs, and I kept finding recipes that said to fill them with vanilla pudding from a box. Yeah, I’d rather just buy them ready-made if I can’t do any better than that. So I went looking for a scratch recipe.
Not only did it come out as a great filling, it’s the best vanilla pudding I’ve ever had. I’ll be making this again soon, minus the cream puffs.
Ingredients
7/8 c. sugar
1/3 c. flour
1/8 tsp. salt
2 c. milk
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla or 1/2 tsp. lemon extract
Directions
Combine the sugar, flour, salt, milk and eggs in a double boiler and stir well.
Cook in the double boiler 15 minutes, or until thickened, stirring constantly.
Set up an ice bath in a large bowl. It’s just a bunch of ice with enough cold water to cover the ice.
Place the inner pan from the double boiler in the ice bath and stir until it is cool.
Stir in the flavoring.
We went with vanilla, but lemon or even peppermint are popular for cream puffs.
The way this is supposed to work is you load the custard in a piping bag and fill the cream puffs from the bottom.
Obviously, ours didn’t rise properly. (We doubled the recipe … except the eggs. Oops.)
So since we couldn’t fill them, we used it for dip.
Which ain’t such a bad idea, actually.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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9 Comments
7/8 cup of sugar? so i use 1/8 seven times? lol
I’m laughing so hard for jordine! Picturing dipping the 1/8 cup 7 times… lol
Jordine, you could measure out 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 … did I get that right?
1/2=2/4=4/8
1/4=2/8
1/8=1/8
Yep! It’s right! I’m a smarty pants! lol
Or do what we did: Look at the line for 3/4, and try to fill it about halfway between there and the top.
Measuring flour based on volume, instead of weight, is a very inexact science. You can see Jenni explain why in The Way to Weigh, Part 1 and The Way to Weigh, Part 2.
PS, Jenni: You forgot to tag part 1 with “PMAT Live”.
Hi! Love this recipe! For me, this is weekend cooking. We will have to try this soon. As a new blogger, I am not familar with the protocol or anything, but I want to add you to my blogroll, cause I love your blog and reference it for myself all the time. Please let me know if you don’t want me to do this. Thank you!
Kayla
If there’s a protocol, someone forgot to tell me when I was getting my blogging license.
Is there a license needed? I’ll be baking some cream puffs this weekend. I think you have a great custard here.
Interesting! I will have to give this a try. I’ll admit I usually fill my eclairs with instant vanilla pudding, and they are still 10x better than the eclairs from the store. But now I have the key to making them 100% from scratch – I’m all for it!
Looks good !
But is this vanilla pudding OR custard ?
Khrissy, because this has eggs technically it’s a custard. But anywhere you’d normally want pudding, this will work.