Vanilla Slice... I did try hard...

Well, I did try hard, but I did make one big mistake. Overall, still a good dessert, but room for improvement.
First of all, the pastry. I never had much luck with shop bought frozen pastry so even when the recipe I used yelled for shop bought frozen pastry, I decided to make my own.

250G plain flour
125ml water
a few drops of lemon juice
40g of butter (more to come, I promise)
1 tsp of salt...
mix well into a soft dough, set. (I started this on Friday night, and I did set that dough with a cross on top over night in the fridge, usually only need an hour though)
Cut cross on top of dough, roll out and place the 100 g extra butter in there. cover like an envelop and roll out on a cool lightly floured surface. Fold, chill in fridge for 30 minutes, and roll out and fold and, chill, for another 30 minutes - repeat for 5-7 times (I did that on and off when I'm in and out of the house, so it's actually longer than 30 minutes in between.
After the final resting in the fridge, I rolled them out like so and cut into the shape to fit into loaf tins, 4 slices, as recipes specify 1 sheet for top and 1 sheet for bottom... and forgot the estimate the puffs...


and they came out of the oven (210C for 8-10 minutes) like so... I had to prick the pastry with a fork if it's home made! eh... I was in trouble, it's too fragile to be pushed back and too puffed to use 2 layers... so I end up splitting the pastry in the middle...

That only meant my fillings will be only half of the height, so here is the finaly slice (well, we do end up with at least 16 pieces like that! I didn't want to make the icing so just quickly dusted with icing sugar....

For the vanilla slice custard:

250 ml milk

750ml thickened cream

4 egg yolks

3/4 cup corn flour

1 tsp vanilla essense (will be nice if I have vanilla beans)

1/2 cup custard poweder

1 cup castor sugar

50g unsalted butter...

boil the milk and vanilla, cool for 10 minutes and sift it into the sugar custard powder and corn flour mixture, mix well. add in cream and return to heat, cook on low heat and stir till mixture is thickened (be careful of the corn flour!) add in butter and mix well, and then take it off the heat. Mix in yolks, one by one.

and then set the mixture in the lined tin (I used loaf tins but it can be really any square tin you can fit your pastries into), lined with alluminium foils first and then the bottom pastry, custart and top pastry and set over night.

It's not too hard to make icing on top at all, what's so hard to mix some icing sugar, butter and hot water? but because it's too puffy, not only my vanilla slices are much thinner, it's also not great for the icing... so next time, I will make sure the icing will go on top!