Custard Cake

This particular cake is called Karpatka. A funny feature of this cake, it disappears pretty much the minute you make it.

Karpaty, or Carpathian Mountains, are one of the largest mountain ranges in Central Europe. Karpatka takes its name from this mountain range, because of the bumpy pastry sprinkled with icing sugar, which resembles mountain tops under a snow blanket. Either that or it comes from that area. Or I just completely made all of that up. I have no idea.

Pastry:

• 1 glass of water
• 125g of butter
• 1 glass of plain flour
• 1 tbsp of baking powder
• 5 eggs

Cream Filling:

• 1 l milk
• 1,5 glass of sugar
• 4 tbsp of plain flour
• 4 tbsp of starch
• 2 egg yolks
• 500g butter
• vanilla extract

Pastry:

1. Boil water with butter. Add flour, mix and allow it to cool down.
2. Once it's cool, add the eggs, mixing continuously. Mix in the baking powder.
3. Split the pastry into two equal parts and place them in separate rectangular cake tins (or bake them separately). Don't forget to grease the tin or line it with baking paper. Bake for around 15-20 minutes at 180 degrees, or until golden.

Cream Filling:

1. Mix the flour and starch with half of the milk. Boil the rest of the milk (be careful - it's very easy to burn milk) and stir in the sugar until dissolved. add in the other half of milk with flour into the boiling milk and leave on the hob for a minute or two until it thickens. Let it cool down.
2. Once cooled, add butter, yolks and a splash of vanilla extract. Mix together until you get a smooth filling.
3. Put the filling between the two parts of the pastry and sprinkle some icing sugar over the top.

This is what the pastry looks like raw:

And this is what the pastry looks like baked and sprinkled with icing sugar: