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Cream Filling
1 tablespoon corn-starch 1 cup milk 1 egg-yolk 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar 1/2 teaspoon butter Mix the corn-starch with two tablespoons of the milk. Heat the rest of the milk in a double boiler and stir the corn-starch paste slowly into it. Stir the mixture until it is smooth and cook it for fifteen minutes. Add the beaten egg-yolk and cook two minutes longer. Remove from the fire and add the salt, sugar and butter. Beat well. Add flavoring. Cool before spreading on layers of cake.
A plain cornstarch pastry cream, thickened with a single yolk and barely sweetened, meant to be spread between cake layers rather than piped. It comes together in about twenty minutes over water.
- The hinge: temper the yolkWhisk two or three spoonfuls of the hot starch mixture into the beaten yolk before returning it to the pan. Dropped in cold, the yolk sets in threads and the filling turns grainy.
- Double boiler, and whyMilk-and-starch scorches easily and the recipe assumes gentle indirect heat. If you use a heavy saucepan directly on the burner instead, keep it low and stir constantly; the cook time drops considerably once the mixture comes to a boil.
- Fifteen minutes is not overcookingOver water the mixture never reaches a hard boil, so the long cook is there to gelatinize the starch fully and drive off the raw-flour taste. Do not shorten it or the filling tastes chalky.
- Yolk safetyAfter the yolk goes in, keep it over the heat the full two minutes and until the mixture visibly thickens again — you want it past 160F. It will get there in a double boiler, but not if you pull it off immediately.
- Confectioners' sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which is fine here, but it means the filling is only lightly sweet — about two tablespoons for a cup of milk. Taste and add more once off the heat if your cake is not itself sweet.
- Cooling without a skinPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface as it cools, or you will have to beat a rubbery film back in. Cool to room temperature at minimum; cold spreads more neatly.
- YieldMakes a generous cup, enough for one layer of an 8- or 9-inch cake. Double it for a three-layer cake.
- KeepingThis is a fresh custard. Refrigerate the filling and the finished cake, and eat within two days.