Vanilla Slice

I had Isobel home from school yesterday, so my plans for catching up on my non kid friendly TV shows went out the window. Instead, I went on the hunt for a particular fish recipe that I wanted to use for last night's dinner, I had the rockling in the fridge, I wanted to use it. It's very easy to get sidetracked when looking through cookbooks/magazines, so I tried to look through the ones I had already put markers on - the fish recipe was more likely to be there. I found a suitable fish recipe, it wasn't the one I was after, but it would work just as well.

I then decided to look through the Marie Claire Flavours book, which I noticed was first published in 2000 and I would have bought it then - I have not made one thing from it! Note to self, buying the cookbooks doesn't make the food magically appear, there is a little more involved in it!

The first section of the book is vanilla, I love vanilla. There is a recipe called 'vanilla school pastries', looks like vanilla slice to me, I check the ingredients, I have everything on hand, soI decide I will give it a go. I have never really been a fan of vanilla slices, mainly because the only ones I have ever had were the commercially bought ones, they're just awful, I always thought a homemade one would have to be good though. I was also thinking that it would impress Philip if they were any good, he loves vanilla slices. Anyway, here it is.

Ingredients

375g ready prepared puff pastry
icing sugar for dusting

vanilla pastry cream

1 1/2 cups of milk
1 cup of cream
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2/3 cup of sugar
1/3 cup of cornflour
1/2 cup of water
6 egg yolks

Preheat the oven to 180°. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface until 3mm thick. cut the pastry into two 15 x 25cm rectangles. Place on a baking tray lined with baking paper, top with another tray as a weight and bake for 15 minutes or until puffed and golden. Allow to cool on racks.

I will say that I cheated a little here and used sheets of puff pastry I already had in the freezer, so all I had to do was cut them to size and follow the rest of the intructions.

To make the pastry cream, place the milk, cream, vanilla extract and sugarin a saucepan over medium low heat and heat until hot, but not boiling. Mix the cornflour and water to a smooth paste (I could not get it to a paste, maybe it was my cornflour) and then whisk into the hot milk mixture. Add the egg yolks and whisk, simmering for 6 minutes or until the mixture has thickened and the cornflour has cooked through. It took a while longer than 6 minutes for me to get the mixture to thicken and even then, I don't think it was as thick as I would have liked it to be. Allow the mixture to cool in the saucepan to room temperrature without refrigerating. Spread one of the baked pastry sheets with the vanilla pastry cream and top with remaining pastry sheet. Regfrigerate for at least 1 hour to set. Sprinkle with icing sugar and cut into pieces to serve. Makes 12 pieces.

I also cut into required pieces before adding the vanilla pastry cream.

The finished product!

Philip had one for dessert, while he was in the study, he came out looking very pleased with himself, saying 'that was excellent'. I thought he was talking about a racing result so I asked what was excellent, he replied with 'the vanilla slice, it was very, very nice, yes, excellent'. Have to be pleased with that.