Method:

SORRY folks. This week, I’m getting something off my chest. It’s something very serious. Something that has been bugging me for much of my entire adult life.

I have lost sleep over it, and it has caused heated arguments. Wars have been started over

more trivial matters.

This week, I intend to set the record straight, and sort the problem out once and for all. This week, I’m making a vanilla slice.

I know, I know, terrifying prospect, isn’t it? But here’s the thing; I remember as a child being allowed the occasional vanilla slice from Dempster Lister’s bakery on Corporation Street in Dewsbury. Rarely, it was another cream cake entirely; an éclair, perhaps, or a cream horn, crunchy with sugar crystals. Incidentally, do you remember when they used to advertise fresh cream cakes on the telly?

You’d not see that in these health-obsessed times, I’m sure. “Naughty but nice” was the catchphrase. Pub quizzers among you will know that the guy who came up with that was none other than Salman Rushdie. Before becoming the notorious author, he spent his working days as a copywriter.

I digress; the vanilla slice was always a huge favourite of mine, mainly because it was such an enjoyably messy thing to tackle (especially in the back of a Mini Clubman bouncing its way up the Halifax Road) and was just so very decadent.

I refined my technique over the years, which will have cheered mum up no end, gently removing the upper pastry level and demolishing the lower, custard-filled part first. Bliss.

And so here’s the thing; Dempster Lister’s used to make a vanilla slice with, as expected, two layers of thin puff pastry, one covered with a few millimetres of sweet white icing, sandwiching a dense layer of vanilla-flecked confectioner’s custard, or crème patissière. Plus, and here’s the point, a layer of raspberry jam. Now, can you find one of these nowadays? Custard and jam? Can you heckerslike.

You can find custard-filled ones with no jam, or cream-filled ones with jam, but, as far as I can make out, nowhere sells the exact vanilla slice of my childhood. For me, the jam makes the whole pastry flourish. It stops it being one-dimensional in flavour. That little lick of fruit is oh-so-important.

And don’t get me started on the chocolate in the icing; that idea should have been rolled into a ball and tossed into the waste paper bin at the design stage.

Chocolate has a lot to offer, but it just seems utterly redundant on the vanilla slice. That effect is more than adequately provided by the éclair.

I was pondering the slice quandary a few weeks ago and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually ever just made my own, and saved a lot of garment-rending and stress. So, I knocked up a batch of crème pat, baked some pastry, and got down to the serious business of making my own, perfect vanilla slice.

It was only later in my research that I discovered the pastry of my Dewsbury youth is actually called a Bavarian slice, and is still to be found with a little effort. I wasn’t going to let this fact get in the way of a good story, besides which I’d got a kitchen full of cream, icing, sheets of pastry and jam which needed using up. So I proceeded anyway. And the results were really good – there’s nothing like having a go at some easy patisserie at home, and this one, as recipes go, is fairly basic. It’s just an assembly job, really, with a little piping to finish. Just don’t let them sit for too long when assembled – the pastry can go terribly soggy.

And sure, feel free to play about with the jam filling or icing. I imagine lemon curd would be lovely, or perhaps a tangy grapefruit marmalade. But for me, and that little lad in a blue duffel coat with his nose pressed to the glass of Dempster Lister’s, it has to be jam. Always. Aprons on!

For the pastry:

500g puff pastry

For the crème patissière:

350ml full-cream milk

2 vanilla pods

4 medium free-range egg yolks

65g unrefined golden caster sugar

15g plain flour

15g cornflour

For the icing:

A few tablespoons icing sugar

Lemon juice

Extras:

A little raspberry jam

A little icing sugar

2 equal-sized baking sheets

Baking parchment

A couple of disposable piping bags

Clingfilm

Method:

First the custard. Split the vanilla pods, and place the seeds into a bowl with the egg yolks.

Put the pods into a pan with the milk, and heat until just about to boil. Whisk the flours and sugar into the egg yolks until smooth, and strain the hot milk over, whisking until you have a smooth custard. Return to the pan and reheat gently.

It will start to bubble and thicken alarmingly, but keep whisking for a few minutes to make sure the flour has cooked out.

Tip the custard into a bowl, quickly cover the surface with clingfilm (this prevents a skin forming) and refrigerate until completely chilled.

For the pastry, heat the oven to 190ºC / Gas 5. Roll out the puff pastry until about ½ cm thick.

Trim if necessary, and place on one of the trays on a sheet of baking parchment. Top with another sheet of parchment, and then the other tray.

If you have only small baking trays, just cut the puff pastry into suitably-sized large rectangles

and bake in batches.

Bake the pastry for 20-25 minutes until a nice uniform deep golden colour. Remove from the oven, and slide onto a cooling rack.

When the pastry is cold, cut into rectangles about 12cm by 5cm. To make the icing, simply add the lemon juice to the icing sugar drop by drop, until you have a thick, smooth icing, just able to be piped and hold its shape. Spoon into a piping bag and seal.

Spoon the crème patissière into another bag. Lay out half of your pastry rectangles and smear each one with a teaspoon of jam, working to the edges.

Then, carefully pipe on two layers of crème patissière, either in arty swirls, or just long ‘sausages’. Place the other pastry rectangles gently on top of the crème pat. Pipe the icing over the upper pastry, and dust with icing sugar and serve as soon as possible.

They will sit for a couple of hours, but no longer.