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Cream Slices
Roll down some puff paste-preferably scraps-and cut into strips about 4 inches in width. Run over with a fork and let stand on the baking tins for a time, then bake in fairly quick oven.
When baked spread boiled custard over each strip, put 2 together and cover with "fondant" or water icing.
Fondant is the best and smoothest eating. When thoroughly set, cut up into strips about 1 inch wide.
A vanilla slice built from puff pastry trimmings, which is exactly what a bakery would have had on hand. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how flat the pastry bakes.
- Oven temperature"fairly quick" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F. Puff paste wants that sort of heat for the layers to steam apart; too cool an oven and the butter tends to leak out before the layers set, leaving the strips greasy and dense.
- Docking and resting"Run over with a fork" is docking, pricking the pastry so it rises evenly rather than doming. The rest on the tins lets the gluten relax so the strips do not shrink and twist in the heat. The recipe gives no time beyond "for a time," and does not say to chill.
- Weight the stripsTrimmings rise raggedly. For slices that stack neatly, bake with a second tin set on top for most of the time, then uncover for the last few minutes to dry and colour the surface.
- Boiled custardIn books of this period "boiled custard" usually means a stirred egg-and-milk custard, which is thin. For a filling that will hold two layers of pastry together and survive slicing, a version thickened with flour or cornstarch as well as egg -- pastry cream -- works far better. If starch-thickened, cook it until it plainly bubbles, then chill it fully before spreading.
- Fondant vs. water icingWater icing is confectioners' sugar with a little water; poured fondant is sugar syrup cooked to about 240F, cooled and worked until it turns opaque, then rewarmed to blood heat to pour. The book prefers fondant because it sets firm and does not crack or run — the difference is real.
- CuttingLet the icing set hard, then cut with a long serrated knife using a sawing stroke, wiping the blade between cuts. Trim the ends square first; the outer inch of any pastry strip is never straight.
- Yield and keepingA pound of puff paste gives roughly two dozen one-inch slices. They are best the day they are made — the custard begins softening the pastry within hours.
Layered puff pastry with custard between is the pastry the French call mille-feuille and the English-speaking trade has long sold as a cream or vanilla slice; the Five Roses version opens with the instruction to use scraps. That detail places it in the working economy of a flour-company cookbook: puff paste was laborious to make by hand, and the trimmings from tarts and patties were too valuable to waste. The recipe assumes the reader has already made a batch of puff paste for something else. The preference for poured fondant over water icing comes with the note that it is "the best and smoothest eating."