• 240ml whole milk
• 40g caster sugar
• 15g corn flour
• 3tsp vanilla essence
• 4x egg yolks
• 22g butter, cubed

Mix the caster sugar, corn flour and egg yolks into a bowl and mix very well.

In a pan heat the milk and vanilla essence, bringing it to the boil.

You want to remove it from the heat just as it comes to the boil. You need to get a good temperature on the milk – if you don’t you’ll end up with thick custard here.

Slowly add the hot milk/vanilla mix to the whisked caster sugar, corn flour & egg yolks.

Whisk the mixture as you add it. You’re tempering the eggs – slowly increasing its temperature.

If you add too much of the milk at once you’ll just end up with scrambled eggs as their temperature increases too fast!

Once all of the milk has been added to the whisked ingredients, return it all to the pain and slowly heat.

As it is heating, you need to keep on stirring it well – it’ll start to thicken quite quickly.

Within just a minute or two it’ll become thick enough for you to easily see the bottom of the pan as you stir it:

Remove from the heat and mix in the butter until it has melted & is well blended in.

Transfer it to a bowl.

Then cover with cling film, pressing the cling film down onto the surface of the creme patissiere – this prevents a skin from forming on the top of the creme patissiere.

Let this mixture cooldown on the side until it is cool enough to go into the fridge.

It should stay in the fridge for at least 6 hours; personally I make this the day before I need to use it so it’ll chill overnight.

This recipe works because we have two thickening agents in play – the egg yolks and the cornflour.

It doesn’t take too much of either to change the consistency of the resulting creme patissiere. If you find it doesn’t have the right consistency for your use:

• Too thick – heat some double creme; work the creme patissiere into it a spoonful at a time
• Too thin – in a pan over a gentle heat, carefully add some cornflour mixed in with some creme into the creme patissiere

You can also just change what you were going to use it for! Thus:

• Too thick – the first time I made creme patissiere I ended up with solid blocks! I was very tempted to turn it into a vanilla slice. Only it being relatively thin saved it! Given that I can get gluten free puff pastry, I’ll probably make these at some point.
• Too thin – it makes a nice thick custard!

The following is just an estimate of the nutirional values for this, based on the ingredients and weights used.

	Per 100g
Kcal	198
Fat	12.3g
Saturated fat	6.3g
Carbs	18.8g
Sugars	14.6g
Fibre	0g
Protein	5.2g

• 40g Dove’s Farm Gluten Free flour
• ½tsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 25g butter, cubed
• 70ml water
• 1tsp Xanthan Gum

Some preparation is recommended here.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C / 180C Fan / 400F / GM6.
Place a large oven proof dish filled with boiling water into the oven.

Sift the flour onto a plate; add on the sugar and xanathan gum

Crack the egg into a bowl & beat it.

In a sauce pan, bring the water and butter to a boil.

Remove from the heat and quickly mix in the flour / sugar / xanthan gum.

Return to the heat for ~30s to make a nice soft dough.

Remove from the heat again and beat in half the egg. Once mixed in, beat in the remaining egg.

Either spoon or pipe the dough onto a baking sheet lined with baking parchment.

Some tricks here:

• Smooth out any peaks in the dough – they’ll burn – by wetting your finger with water and brushing the peaks away
• This is a light mixture & a fan oven could easily blow the paper away! Avoid disaster by using a small bit of dough between the baking tray and parchment

Bake for 10 minutes and then remove the water filled dish from the oven.

Bake for a further 15-25 minutes, until the rolls are golden brown.

Cut small slits into each roll to let steam out & then let them sit in the cooling oven for ~5 mins to dry off.

Let fully cool and then fill with whichever filling you wished to use – I found this handy tool in a local cookery shop which let me easily fill the ones I made.

The end result was very tasty indeed!

I could’ve added a ganache to this, but I’m still rather conflicted about chocolate & these didn’t really need it!

The following is just an estimate of the nutirional values for this, based on the ingredients and weights used. The below assumes that you’re putting in ~14g of the Creme Patissiere shown above into each profiterole.

	Per 100g	Per profiterole (~25g)
Kcal	312	78
Fat	19.6g	4.9g
Saturated fat	10.6g	2.7g
Carbs	28.2g	7.1g
Sugars	10.2g	2.6g
Fibre	0.2g	<0.1g
Protein	7.3g	1.8g