Why It Works
- Swapping instant pudding for an airy mixture of whipped cream and vanilla bean-infused pastry cream results in a more complex-tasting filling.
- Coating the top of the éclair cake with a semi-sweet chocolate ganache instead of ready-made frosting balances the dessert with a pleasant bittersweetness.
A classic éclair is a refined confection of golden choux filled with pastry cream and glazed with chocolate, but the thing most people think of when they hear “éclair cake” is decidedly less formal: An icebox cake in which graham crackers are layered with boxed pudding mix, refrigerated until softened, then topped with store-bought chocolate frosting.
That’s all well and good, and we appreciate an easy dessert that can feed a crowd while requiring literally no investment of time or skill to whip together. But if you need a recipe to explain how to fill a baking dish with boxed pudding, boxed crackers, and boxed frosting, then we’ve got a really great recipe for boiling water to show you next! No, this is Serious Eats, so we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna be just a little more ambitious—just enough to transform something extremely ho-hum into something still relatively easy but significantly more delicious.
Serious Eats / Jen Causey
Instead of instant pudding, we are using an airy mixture of whipped cream and vanilla-bean infused pastry cream. To sound fancy, we could use the French terms “crème pâtissière” for the pastry cream and “crème légère” for the mixture of the pastry cream with the whipped cream, but in the spirit of this shamelessly Americanized dessert, we’ll stick with the English here, thank you very much, mon frère.
For those who came here expecting boxed pudding mix, don’t run away just yet! We promise, pastry cream may sound like the kind of thing that requires a culinary school degree to make, but it’s so simple, and so, so much better. You can do it, and now’s the time.
Serious Eats / Jen Causey
As for the chocolate, we skip the ready-made frosting and opt for a simple semi-sweet ganache instead, which brings a pleasant bitterness that balances the dessert. “Ganache” is another word that may send some running to the nearest aisle of Betty Crocker (no hate, no hate), but please stay. If you can heat butter and cream and pour it over dark chocolate, you can make ganache. (In fact, if you do that, you will have, by definition, made ganache. It’s easy, I promise.)
The graham crackers remain the graham crackers: We get it, the brilliant ease of this recipe is that there’s no baking involved, and we’re staying true to that.
Editor’s Note
This recipe was developed by Melissa Gray; the headnote was written by Genevieve Yam.
