Monday, October 10, 2022

Cake, Elevated

I've been frosting my cakes with a pretty basic buttercream icing for a while now. It's easy to make, it tastes good, and it has lots of nostalgia value for me. But, I figured it was time to try branching out a bit, and try something different.

I did a little introspection about what I felt like I wanted, and decided that going down the road of pastry cream might be an interesting idea. However, pastry cream requires, among other things, separated egg yolks. I'm perfectly capable of separating eggs, but I tend to avoid it since that leaves me with an imbalance of egg to yolk. I can fix this problem by using powdered egg yolk, but before I invested in that I figured it was worth a test run.

As it happens, Jello instant pudding makes a decent first-order approximation of pastry cream. It's basically sugar, corn starch and flavour/colours, which you mix with milk. It's not really the same thing, but it's close enough to get a feel for it.

The verdict is: I think I like it. It adds a nice smooth creaminess to the cake eating experience, which I feel like I had been missing before. Since this is lemon jello pudding, it helps boost the lemon flavour in the cake, which is pretty subdued.

Perhaps I will get the ingredients to make a proper pastry cream for the next batch of cakes.

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