Having watched GBBO final the night before, where custard slice was the first challenge the contestants faced, I felt like having another go at it, but I went with Paul Hollywood’s recipe this time- proper custard, none of the powdered nonsense. Also, I wanted to see how I liked the rough puff pastry, which meant making the entire thing from scratch, non buying French pastry from Polish deli for instance. The pastry worked, wasn’t too difficult and time consuming, I would maybe add just a touch of icing sugar to it next time, to make it less savoury.

225g of plain flour, 1/2 tsp of salt, 200g of cold, unsalted butter, less than 140 ml of water made it all possible, for the butter I used the coarse grater and did the folding method 3 times, like with puff pastry, only the butter all went in in one go. Once folded and rested 3 times for about 15 minutes, I then divided it into 2 and baked under extra trays to keep them flat for roughly 20-25 minutes in 200 degrees, all the time checking and making sure they don’t overbake.

In the meantime the custard got done. 500ml of full fat milk, 100g of caster sugar( some of it vanilla sugar), vanilla paste, 4 egg yolks, 40g of cornflour. Yolks beaten up with sugar, cornflour added towards the end, while the milk was getting heated up with the vanilla. The custard got finished with 40 g of unsalted butter, covered and chilled until needed.

The homemade rough puff seems to be easier to cut with a serrated knife than the shop bought one. The nicer looking sheet of pastry went on top, finished with a little icing- lemon juice and icing sugar and then some feathered pattern of chocolate. Nice cake, much better attempt than the last one. And the next day tastes even better. 🙂