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Cheater’s Pastry Cream

4.6

(19)

A quick nocook pastry cream spread onto a crumb crust to make a tart with stone fruit.
Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Micah Marie Morton

This genius method for quick and easy pastry cream comes from cookbook author Vallery Lomas, the winner of The Great American Baking Show. Lomas’s recipe calls for just four ingredients: cream cheese, heavy cream, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract. There’s no hand-whisking or finicky tempering involved, and the ingredients don’t even have to come to room temperature. Use this no-cook pastry cream to fill a seasonal fruit tart, cream puffs, or Boston cream pie. Layer it into this towering Crepe Cake, or simply serve it with fresh fruit for dipping!

Recipe information

  • Total Time

    10 minutes

Ingredients

One 8 oz. package (226g) full-fat cream cheese, cold
¾ cup (180ml) heavy cream
½ cup (60g) confectioners' sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Preparation

  1. Place all ingredients in a large bowl. Use an electric mixer to beat until very stiff peaks form and the filling smooths out, about 2 minutes. Store covered in the refrigerator until well chilled. The pastry cream can be refrigerated up to 3 days.

Life is What You Bake it Cookbook Cover on Purple Background
From Life Is What You Bake It: Recipes, Stories, and Inspiration to Bake Your Way to the Top: A Baking Book © 2021 by Vallery Lomas. Reprinted with permission by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Buy the full book from Penguin Random House, Amazon, or Bookshop.

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