12 Easy and Irresistible Custard Desserts to Try Right Now!

What's more delicious than custard? Obviously a dessert with custard. Eggs, corn starch (or flour), milk, sugar, lemon zest or vanilla: just a few ingredients are enough to make this basic preparation at home without errors, delicious to eat as it is, with a spoon, and perfect for filling cakes, sponge cake, shortcrust pastry tarts and puff pastry sweets. An evergreen recipe with many variations (for example with chocolate or rum) which also serves to prepare other famous essential pastry creams, such as diplomat cream (together with whipped cream) and chiboust cream (paired with Italian meringue). In our selection we have collected 12 desserts to make with its classic version which becomes the absolute protagonist: from the timeless grandmother's cake to the equally homely custard pie, passing through irresistible glasses and fresh fruit baskets for lovers of single portions.

1. Grandma's Cake

Two crumbly shortcrust pastry shells contain a delicious custard filling, all decorated on the surface with pine nuts and icing sugar. It is with its simplicity and its genuine ingredients that grandma's cake has conquered entire generations, deserving a place of honor among the home-made pastry desserts of the 80s and the 90s, despite its Tuscan origins dating back further into the time, also being cited by Pellegrino Artusi, the father of Italian cuisine.

2. Nua Cake

The nua cake was a star of the web for a long time, only to become familiar and no longer viral. The secret of its success is the soft dough, made without butter, which after being poured into the mold is enriched with spoonfuls of custard: it is forbidden to level them, they sink during cooking creating the characteristic craters on the surface, a distinctive touch of this dessert.

3. Custard Pie

If you are looking for a perfect passepartout dessert to be personalized, the custard pie is the solution for you. Good both for a snack and as a dessert, it is the classic dessert with a shortcrust pastry base (we prepared it with oil, but it can also be with butter) filled with vanilla-flavored custard and embellished with the characteristic lattice decoration.

4. Strawberry Crumble

The combination of strawberries and custard is truly irresistible. For this reason we have included in our list a version of the crumbled one which, in addition to being crumbly and crunchy, becomes fresh and juicy with the fruit cut into pieces. The butter shortcrust pastry can be worked quickly with your hands or in the mixer and acts both as a base and as a covering for the dessert. Consider it a dessert for a lunch or dinner with friends under the sign of spring.

5. Creamy Millefeuille

Millefeuille is a great classic of French pastry making that needs no introduction: it is particularly loved for the play of textures between the light and fragrant sheets and the velvety custard, and for its elegant and refined aesthetics, which makes it one of the most popular cakes to celebrate special occasions, such as birthdays or anniversaries.

6. Peach and Cream Cake

This cake immediately takes us into summer, with the colors of the sun and the scents of ripe fruit. It is a soft dessert, with a delicate flavor, making the most of all the sweetness of the peaches and custard. Furthermore, it is also very simple to prepare: it follows the same logic as the pinwheel cake, with the spiral decorated with peach slices that enrich the design. After 50 minutes in the oven it is completed with a sprinkling of icing sugar to taste.

7. Fruit and Cream Tartlet

Fresh fruit and custard: a combination that will never tire us, especially when enjoyed in miniature format. These tartlets are ideal to end Sunday lunch: baskets of shortcrust pastry with oil made with the help of a tart mold and first cooked with no filling and then filled with generous custard, slices of kiwi, blueberries and leaves of mint. Depending on the season, you can choose the fruit you prefer, from strawberries to mandarin.

8. Puff Pastry Cream Horns

To your pastries cabarets on Sunday, it is also possible to add puff pastry cream horns, simple and delicious sweets to be served at the end of the meal. The casing is prepared with wrapping shortcrust pastry around cones (use a cylinder-shaped mold, to facilitate cooking and getting them off). Once cooled, they are filled with the custard cream and sprinkled with icing sugar.

9. Danish Pastries

Would you like to bake home-made specialties from a bakery to smell that unmistakable aroma throughout your home? Try these very easy Danish rolls, soft brioches perfect as a dessert for breakfast or brunch. The preparation resembles that of cinnamon rolls, therefore with the dough leavened for an hour and a half which is filled with custard and raisins and left to rest further for 30 minutes before being baked. Puffy and soft, the rolls are excellent to eat while still warm.

10. Paris-Brest

This is always a show-stopper dessert, we can guarantee that you will impress all your friends: Paris-Brest (pronounced pah-ree brest) is an easy, rich French recipe you can make at home. An almond-studded choux pastry is split horizontally and filled with praline crème mousseline—a mixture of vanilla pastry cream, nutty praline paste, and whipped butter. It’s then dusted with powdered sugar, sliced, and served. The name Paris-Brest comes from the name of a bicycle route that runs from Paris (the French Capital) to Brest (a town in Brittany).  This dessert is a perfect balance of crisp on the outside, with creaminess on the inside.

11. Pasteis De Nata

Pasteis De Nata is a classic Portuguese custard tart, also known as Doce Conventual. Every region in Portugal has its own version of the custard tart, but all of them contain egg yolks and sugar—the basic ingredients for a delicious custard. The recipe for Pasteis De Nata is surprisingly easy to make, in that you only need to whip a quick homemade custard and combine it with puff pastry (instead of making your own). These tarts are perfect for a special occasion, simply prepare the puff pastry and homemade custard ahead of time, and bake before serving. These bite-sized treats will be a real crowd-pleaser!

12. Caramel Custard Cake

This creamy caramel cake, also known as a caramel custard cake or leche flan cake, is decadent. Without being overly sweet, it has a rich caramel flavor with a smooth taste. The cake consists of three distinct layers, baked in the same pan, at the same time. First, you make a homemade caramel (only water and sugar us needed) and add it to your cake tin. Then you make the custard and add it on top of the caramel. Finally, the cake batter is made is poured on top of the custard. Once baked, you are left with a delicious three-layer cake that combines the sweetness of caramel, the smooth taste of custard, and the fluffiness of a chiffon cake!