It looks like dessert rather than breakfast doesn’t it?
My daughter came home from a sleepover at a friend’s house when she was little, with a very exciting story to tell. They had apple pie and custard, for dinner, first! And apparently they did it often in her friend’s house and why couldn’t we have just dessert for dinner?
Once I established the details, I thought, why not? It was home-made real apple pie with wholemeal crust, with real egg custard. A perfectly balanced nutritious dinner.
We don’t often have dessert for dinner, but I quite like dessert for breakfast. Real egg custard is sooooo easy, I really don’t get custard powder. Eggs are also a superfood, high in protein, B12 and choline, which is brain food.
The Recipe:
There are lots of methods for custard. This is my super simple, working morning fast method.
For one – multipy by the number of serves.
- Put ¾ cup of milk in a pot with one teaspoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of (real) vanilla essence. Low fat milk works fine, as does soy milk or oat milk, and I like to substitute treacle for sugar, though it does make the custard a dark colour.
- Heat till it is very hot, just before it starts to rise.
- While it is heating, blend together one medium egg and a good teaspoon of cornflour (or corn starch in USA). I use a stick blender, but you can use a blender, food processor, or an egg beater (though the latter means you need a helper for the next bit).
- With the blender going, pour the hot milk into the egg.
- Tip the mixture back into the pot and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for literally one minute until it thickens.
(The Breakfast Cereal Challenge is my 2011 challenge – a year’s worth of breakfast recipes based on in-season ingredients, that are quick and easy enough to be a real option for weekdays, and that are preferable, in nutrition, ethics, and taste, to the overpackaged, overpriced, mostly empty packets of junk food marketed as “cereal” .The Muesli Bar Challenge was my 2010 Challenge.)
When I was little, all we’d ever had was the Jello pudding mix (powder). It always seemed kind of strange to me to be dependant on that company and their little box of some mysterious secret formula, so I asked my Mom if pudding could be made from scratch. She produced a cookbook and said “have at it kiddo”. The texture on my first attempt was not so smooth, but it was tasty. What a fun new world. Some of my “from scratch” experiments were yummy and some were disasters, but isn’t the kitchen a fun place to play.
brenda from arkansas
For all my ‘from scratch cooking’ …it has never occured to me to not use custard powder due to a disastorous cooking lesson in home economics where I received a zero for my custard ( understandably if you had seen it). I will give this a go now though. I like the idea of dessert for breakfast. My children still talk about the unbelievably hot night where I made home made ice cream for dinner …it is talked about in reverent voices as they look back on that special night.