The other reason I've avoided making the Bostini up to now was that the recipe is really intimidating. If there's one thing that my brief affair with making choux crème taught me, it's that I am not very good at making crème anglaise. But the recipe here was different from those I had encountered in the past, so I decided to give it a go.
I've also never worked with vanilla pods before. Splitting the pod and scraping out the seeds was a completely new experience for me. I was surprised by how moist the pod was on the inside.
That's what she said.
In the book, Rose gives instructions for cutting the recipe down from eight servings to six, which seemed perfect since I knew that the dinner party would be attended by five people. As I started to pour the pastry cream into my fancy dollar-store plastic cups, I started to freak out a little. The pastry cream didn't come even remotely close to filling the cups 2/3 of the way, as the recipe specified. In fact, I barely had enough to fill only five cups halfway.
In contrast to the pastry cream, the reduced cupcake recipe ended up making way more cake than I needed. Which ended up being a good thing, since a surprise extra guest showed up to the party. Although I didn't have enough pastry cream to make a whole extra Bostini for them, they were able to have some cake and chocolate sauce, which was pretty good.
I was also freaking out a little as I pulled these out of the oven. I was worried that cupcakes baked without liners would stick to the pan and end up a horrible mess. Fortunately, that didn't happen. The cakes popped out of the tray easily.
The chocolate sauce was probably the easiest part of the whole affair. Butter + chocolate + heat. Easy as can be.
I brought all of the components to the dinner party in separate containers and then assembled them there just before serving. A single cupcake was placed, upside-down, into the cup filled with the pastry cream and then chocolate sauce was poured on top. We added a mint leaf as a garnish and it looked like something way more professional than it was.
For all of the trouble that these put me through (I have realized that I am a very anxious baker), this dessert came together beautifully in the final stages. The pastry cream was wonderful. The cake was light and airy; pairing perfectly with the rich pastry cream. The only real problem I had was that I ended up with a lot of extra chocolate sauce and twice as many cupcakes as I needed.
But how can I complain about having too much dessert? In the end, it all found a good home in someone's face. :)
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