Mum is visiting, due to her birthday treat dinner in Dinings. In fact, Mum should be at home at the moment, if certain person hadn’t screwed up her return plane tickets. Certain person did, however , so certain person had to buy two return tickets last night and 200 quid later she could get over it. This afternoon, to make life sweeter, we made karpatka.

The two pastry bases needed to make it are similar to the classic choux pastry. Mum used a glass of water that she boiled and melted half a margarine in it, took it off the heat and added a glass of plain flour mixing vigorously. After it all cools down a  bit, 5 eggs are added, one after another, all worked in before the next one is added. The pastry is to be nice, smooth and shiny. A teaspoon of baking powder and the pastry is ready to be divided in two and baked for about 50 minutes each in 180 Celsius, if still moist inside, needs to go back in to dry out.

The filling is made by cooking budyn, a Polish simple powdered dessert similar to custard, made with milk. For our filling I prepared budyn according to the instructions on the packet PLUS a table spoon of plain flour, it has to be quite thick. When cooled, I blitzed it with half a margarine and some vanilla sugar.

The cake is finished off with a generous amount of icing sugar.