It’s light, moist and has great vanilla flavor. The pastry cream sits in the middle of one of my favorite vanilla cupcakes. Of course my old self is rolling her eyes at my current self for calling it “easy.” 😉 🙂 It’s actually pretty easy to make and quite delicious. I now know that cornstarch and the egg yolks are what actually thickens the cream and I’ve made pastry cream more times than I can count. I find pastry cream to be much less intimidating these days. Yes, he’s had many of my cakes since then, but the Boston Cream Pie had to be revisited. Of course to send him off, I had to redeem myself. It was sad to see him go, but I was happy for him in his new path. Well fast-forward about 5 years and that co-worker has moved on to another adventure. Ultimately the cream was much too thin and by the time the cake made it’s way to work, it was basically two layers of cake that used to have pastry cream between them, but was now in a puddle around the bottom. I had no idea what I did at the time and it’s been so long that I don’t even remember what recipe I used to look back and figure it out, but I remember wondering how in the word the pastry cream would thicken enough to hold up between cake layers. I’d been fairly successful up until this point, so I figured it’d be all good. Well one such request was for a Boston Cream Pie – and I had never even made pastry cream before. It was a great way for me to try things I hadn’t tried before – the best way to learn! Even now, I still love unexpected requests that give me a challenge or get me to step out of the box. I’d ask co-workers what their favorite dessert or flavor was if what was their birthday and then I’d challenge myself to come up with a cake. So back around the time I started baking, I was taking a lot of the desserts I’d make into work. Small changes can make a huge difference – and be incredibly frustrating. With baking, it’s a whole different ball game. With cooking, I was used to being able to throw things in a dish and not have to worry too much that small changes to a recipe would ruin it. Lots of hours have been spent in the kitchen. So when I started baking several years back, it was quite an effort to really learn what I was doing.

Sure, there was some baking around holidays, but day-to-day was all about the cooking.

🙂 The truth is, I grew up cooking with my mom, not baking. So I guess today is the day that I will dispel the myth that I have always been an amazing baker – just in case you were under that impression.

Boston cream pie cupcakes