Cake with pastry cream

During this quarantine period, I am making a lot of desserts for the happiness of my husband! However, this means that often I have many leftover ingredients to deal with. Like few days ago, for example, when I made a dozen of choux and enough custard cream to fill hundreds of them. I hate to throw away food, but had no idea what to do with all this custard cream, so I decided to go for an experiment and bake a cake with chunks of pastry cream in it.

The cake is super simple and incredibly easy to bake, but this doesn’t mean that you have to compromise on the taste, as it is delicious. I really hope you will enjoy it!

Ingredients for the cake:

• 300 gr flour
• 200 gr eggs
• 100 gr milk
• 150 gr sugar
• 40 ml oil ( any vegetable seed oil will be fine)
• 14 gr baking powder
• 1 orange zest
• 1 lemon zest

Ingredients for the custard cream:

• 315 gr milk
• 65 gr cream
• 55 gr sugar
• 60 gr yolk
• 15 gr eggs
• 20 gr custard powder
• 1 vanilla pod

Method:

Let’s start with the pastry cream. My suggestion is to make it at least a couple of hours in advance, so that it has the time to rest and set, which will allow you to cut it in to chunks.

Mix the cream with the milk, add the vanilla pod and bring to the boil, in the meanwhile mix the sugar with the custard powder in a bowl, then add slowly the eggs and yolk while whisking continuously,  in order to avoid any lumps.

Once the cream and milk mix is boiling, pour some of it in the egg mix and whisk it to make sure that the temperature raises evenly across the mix. Now, pour the content of the bowl in the remaining liquid and bring to boil while constantly mixing it. Cook it for a couple of minutes and then pour in a bowl/box, cover it with cling film (make sure the cling film touches the custard cream, otherwise you will have a thick layer of cream forming on the top of the custard and water will condense on top of it) and put it in the fridge to rest.

Now, we can start to prepare the mix for the cake. Start whipping the eggs with sugar until they become very fluffy add slowly add the milk and oil, making sure your mix incorporates properly all the liquids before you add more. Once this is done, add the orange and lemon zests and finally the flour mixed with baking powder. 

Cover a round baking cake tin of 24 cm diameter with baking paper. Preheat the oven at 180°, pour the mix in the cake tin, then add on top of it you pastry cream chunks, just like in the picture.

Bake for about 40 minute and then leave to cool outside of the oven until it reaches room temperature (this is to avoid that the cake breaks while removing it from the cake tin). Remove from the cake tin and serve with icing sugar on top.