Tuesday, 4 June 2013

Home-made Vanilla Custard




Those days are gone where I used to sit late hours going through several blogs, skimming through their recipes, admiring their photography and write ups and even more, waiting for the new recipe impatiently. Those were the days when we had very few blogs around, and even lesser ones with quality write ups, recipes and photos. I used to follow some blogs religiously and it often disappointed me when the blogger delayed their posts and when I have to see the old post again and again every time I open it. It’s not that there are no great blogs around now. There are. In plenty. And very good ones. But it becomes too difficult to keep up with the updates. Priority in life has also changed and blog hopping has come down to bare minimum, sadly.


 These days whenever I open up my blog for recipes, the same recipe on the front page has been putting me off. It’s more than a month that I blogged something and I am bored enough to see the same recipe that I just have to change it. I haven’t been cooking anything interesting recently and haven’t touched the camera for few weeks now. So whatever recipes that will I will be posting here would be from my drafts, some of them that I shot more than a year ago.


Today I am sharing a very simple recipe here. This is a recipe that I made quite a while ago, when my son kept asking for custard. I always had loads of egg yolks left over from my macaron making. And I decided to put them together into good old custard.  It is simple, clean, creamy with lovely vanilla flavour from the vanilla beans. You could have it along with fruits or just serve them with cake or crumble or use them up in trifle.



Homemade vanilla Custard

Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Ingredients:
6-7 large egg yolks
1 ½ cups whole milk
300mls double cream
½ - ¾ cup caster sugar, depending on how sweetyou like it
1 tbsp corn flour
2 vanilla pods

Preparation:
1.In a bowl whisk together sugar, egg yolks and corn flour until combined. Keep them aside.

2. In a saucepan, pour in milk, double cream. Split open the vanilla bean, scrape the seeds into the milk and cream mixture and add the pod into the pan.

3. Heat the pan gently, stirring the mixture throughout until it comes to boil. Take off heat and let it cool down, for about 10 minutes.

4. Strain this mixture into egg yolk mixture whisking all the way through, making sure the milk mixture is cold enough not to scramble the eggs. Discard the vanilla beans.

5. Pour the mixture back into the sauce pan, and simmer for about 10 minutes constantly stirring until it becomes thick and coats the back of the spoon. Keep it covered if you don’t want the skin to form on top, you can serve it immediately or chill for later use.

Notes:
1.Cook the custard on a very low heat and stirring  throughout as increasing heat may scramble the eggs.

2. This custard is of semi-thick consistency, if you want pouring consistency, reduce the corn flour to a teaspoon and if you want it thick, increase the corn flour to 2 tbsp.

3. You can add 2 teaspoon of vanilla extract if vanilla bean isn’t available.