boston cream cupcakes

I'm going to try and keep this post as brief as possible because the pictures pretty much speak for themselves (and I had over 100 of them to sort through!) But basically, the food channel inspired us to make these extremely rich, adorable little boston cream pie cupcakes. 

The process of making these came in three different parts: making vanilla cupcakes, chocolate ganache, and the PASTRY CREAM (<---the caps lock is to show the intensity of that task). 



The cupcakes and the chocolate were all relatively straightforward. (although we still can't figure out why the vanilla cupcakes always end up tasting slightly like cornbread). The pastry cream was where this all got very challenging. It was a panicked frenzy of nonstop whisking and stirring to ensure that the milk wouldn't curdle...and our eggs ended up cooking in the very last step of the process, which was a huge letdown. 

at least we used a real vanilla bean!!

scrambled eggs....?

And although the pastry cream scrambled eggs tasted mighty good, they were in no shape to be assembled into our boston cream cupcakes. SO we quickly googled "easy pastry cream recipe" and used that. We gave it a second shot and....BAM!

pastry cream!

So the assembling began, first on our mini tester cupcakes, and then we moved to the real deal cupcakes. They were sliced in half, the top was cut out, the bottom half smothered in pastry cream, top half put back on, and the hole was filled with more cream! Then the hole that was cut out was placed on the very top as a garnish. Eventually, this would all be topped off with our chocolate ganache. whew.

they all looked different...unique little cupcakes!

oh my god. look at that decadence. these puppies were so filling that we couldn't even finish them! and that's saying something!! 














Now...what to do with the leftover pastry cream?