Alright, first post. This past week, I decided to try my hand at making banana pudding and homemade nilla wafers, both recipes authored by one of my favorite food bloggers/editors, Stella Parks. The recipe for the banana pudding was taken from here from SeriousEats while the recipe for the nilla wafers was taken from her book, BraveTart.

Part of the reason that I wanted to try making pudding was that we had so much milk in the house and I wanted to use some of it before it expired. This was also a good way for me to explore making pudding/custard (can be applied for other things like pie, cream puffs, or other stuff!). Naturally, because I love banana-themed desserts, banana pudding was an easy choice for me. Nilla wafers to go with the banana pudding seemed like the next logical step.

Honestly though, I don’t actually know too much about nilla wafers and didn’t really grow up eating them. They taste like mini crunchy vanilla cookies. I don’t think this would be something that I would casually snack on but I can see why they would be paired well with banana pudding. Because I had the recipe and I like making life a little more difficult for myself, I wanted to try my hand at making homemade nilla wafers.

Nilla Wafers

The batter was pretty easy to bring together and smelled like sugar cookies/vanilla cake. It gave me an excuse to get some piping bag practice as well to pipe the batter in the wafer shape. I didn’t have a round tip so I used a star tip instead, which worked equally as well. I wondered if it could have worked if I rolled the batter like cookies since it seemed stiff enough. I also learned not to stuff all the batter inside the piping bag otherwise it would leak everywhere. In hindsight, I wished that I did two batches of batter piping instead of trying to do it all in one go.

Things got a little more interesting when I started baking. I noticed that at the 12-min mark (roughly half the original baking time), the bottoms of the wafers already started to brown but the tops looked as pale as the batter, not golden brown like the original Nilla wafer. It seemed like the wafers baked like cookies. This batch tasted like sugar cookies as well. I wanted to see if I could bake the cookie more evenly where both the bottom and top of the wafers would be golden brown.

This is where I started to experiment:

As you can see, batch 4 is where I started to push things a little too much, haha. I think somewhere near batch 3 was where the sweet spot would have been at. Nevertheless, I learned that there is a difference between a wafer and a cookie:

• Wafer: A thin, flat, crispy cookie, usually used as a decoration/paired with something else, baked for more time
• Cookie: Can be thick/thin, crispy/chewy, can be standalone, baked for less time

Banana Pudding

I think I could’ve fussed less over this in hindsight. The directions were pretty straightforward and reminded me of a custard recipe that I made before. This is where I learn that there is a difference between custard and pudding.

• Custard: a cooked mixture of milk/cream, sugar, eggs where the egg yolk:cornstarch ratio is much higher than that of pudding, more stiff, what people usually think for pastry cream
• Pudding: a cooked mixture of milk/cream, sugar, eggs, cornstarch, more runny, not as stiff as custard

One thing that’s good to remember is that it’s pretty imperative to keep whisking so the milk doesn’t brown at the bottom. Also use a stainless steel saucier, milk doesn’t actually burn that easily and this way, you can use a metal whisk, instead of a silicon whisk.

The banana flavor (from bananas steeped in milk overnight) wasn’t too strong. The pudding by itself felt a little heavy on my tongue. The vanilla and clove flavors were also strong for my taste. I needed something to lighten it and dilute the strong flavors. So, I took two different paths with the banana pudding.

• Option 1: Fold in whipped cream with banana pudding and make a sort of cremeux, eat with wafers
• Option 2: Serve banana pudding with the whipped cream, bananas, and wafers, the classic way

In the end, Option 1 did taste lighter and more balanced in flavor than the banana pudding by itself and it was more presentation-worthy. However, I also did like Option 2 of just eating banana pudding with whipped cream and bananas, which accomplished the same result. I think Option 1 would’ve tasted better if served with banana slices. My personal favorite was Option 2, the classic way of eating pudding with whipped cream and bananas.

Maybe I can use this pudding recipe as a base for banana cream pie in the future?