Karpatka Cream Pie

Karpatka is a Polish type of cream pie, that is in fact a big eclair. I've loved eclairs with a passion ever since I was a tiny little girl, so consider me sold on anything eclair in advance.

As I try to minimize the use of processed sugar and butter in our sweet treats, I made a budget version with reduced sugar and sunflower oil, which was a big success at home.

First I made the cream - in my version it is simple custard cream:

Ingredients for the cream:

• 2 eggs
• 50 g flour
• 50 g sugar
• 500 g milk
• vanilla
• 1 tbsp butter 

After the cream was cooked, I covered it with cling foil and set it aside. Then I made the eclair dough.

Ingredients for the eclairs:

• 100 g milk
• 100 g water
• 100 g sunflower oil
• 125 g flour
• 1 tbsp sugar 
• pinch of salt
• 4 medium size eggs  

Preparation of the eclair dough:

Bring the milk, water and oil mixture with added salt and sugar to boil, reduce the heat, add the flour and stir, until the flour is absorbed and the dough is smooth and doesn't stick to the walls of the pot. Take the pot off the plate and leave it to cool a bit. Beat lightly the 4 eggs together and start adding them gradually to the dough. A lot of energetic and strenuous stirring is required to incorporate all the 4 eggs into the dough, so in this case I used the available helper - my husband :)

Once the dough was ready, I divided it into two fairly equal round cakes and baked them free form in the oven for 20 min at 200C. However, I wouldn't recommend it, as the eclairs puff up a lot and came out pretty shapeless. Next time I would bake each cake separately in a ring cake form.

In order to make a descent looking cake, I cut my eclairs to fit the ring cake form. Of course, I preserved the cuttings, cooked some pudding and I made three additional bowls of pudding with eclair cuttings. Thus we had our dessert in the evening and the cake could peacefully stay in the fridge overnight.

I decorated the cake with fresh mint, frozen blueberries and a dusting of powdered sugar and in the morning I also added some melted dark chocolate (not pictured here), which was heartily approved by son and husband. 

All in all, an easy and affordable holiday dessert, I would unreservedly recommend it.