EASY Vanilla Cream Pie with Homemade Pie Crust

Hi everybody, welcome back to Marie's Kitchen. I'm so glad you're here. Today we are making a vanilla cream pie with a homemade crust. And while this pie is delicious in its own right, the really great news is that once you learn to make this pie, you can make just about any other cream pie, including coconut cream pie, banana cream pie, chocolate cream pie, and more. So if you're looking to improve your pie making skills, you're in the right place. And even if you've never made a pie, don't worry, I'll walk you through step by step. All right, let's get started. We're going to start with two cups of milk, and then we'll add one half cup of heavy whipping cream. And next is our dry ingredients. So we're going to start with one quarter cup corn starch, and this is what's going to thicken our pudding. To that we'll add one half teaspoon salt, and one half cup sugar. I also have a Stevia Sugar King blend substitute that you can use if you want to reduce sugar, but in this one I'm using the regular sugar. That's one half cup. We'll give this a stir. So now to the dry ingredients, we're going to add a little bit of our liquid. And when you add liquid to cornstarch, it can form lumps. And so what we're doing now is we're just going to whisk this together until there are no more lumps. You don't want any lumps of cornstarch in your pudding. That's not a good way to start. So just use a little bit of liquid, you don't have to measure, maybe a half cup, and just whisk that until you see no more lumps. If you put all of this liquid in with the cornstarch, it would be such a sloppy mess trying to whisk it, and you wouldn't be able to see all the lumps. So that's why I do just a little bit of liquid. Oop, there's some on the side. Let's scrape that up there. Check all our sides and edges for any cornstarch stuck there. And I do love this new silicone whisk I just got. It's a lot quieter and works just as well. If you'd like the link, I'll put it in the description box. Okay, so there we have that all mixed in, no lumps. Now most recipes for cream pies will want you to heat some liquid on the stove and then pour a little bit of the liquid a little bit at a time while whisking constantly into a mixture of egg yolks and other liquid. And that's called tempering your egg yolks. And it's a way to add hot liquid to egg yolks without scrambling the eggs. And for some reason, I do not like to do that. I just don't. So I've come up with an easier way. Isn't necessity, what do they say? Necessity breeds invention. Something like that. I forgot the quote. I'm always forgetting. It's like you just get up here and you forget. So somebody leave it in the comments about necessity is the something of invention. My mom used to say that. Because that's how we came up with a lot of things as kids, it's like you didn't have a choice. You didn't have the money, you didn't have a car. So you just figured it out. Okay, now we're going to get our four egg yolks. Now to do that, I'm just going to separate the egg yolks by cracking on a flat surface. Then we'll open it up, let the white drip out. Drip, drip, drip. Then we save our yolks over there. So there's one. Hi. Oops. Separate eggs. Looks like I have a helper. Thanks for coming. I know she's been waiting for this pie to be ready. What's this? That is the cornstarch, the sugar, and the salt mixed with a little bit of liquid. Now we can add our egg yolks. Do you want to add them? Yeah. Egg yolks to this cornstarch. Yeah, go ahead. Add it to it. Mix it up. You don't have to like crazy whisk it hard or anything. Just give it a whisk. So mix those in a little bit. Yeah. And then we'll add the rest of our liquid. So now we're ready to make this into pudding. Now we're going to turn this to about medium to medium-high heat and whisk it. And it's going to start to thicken. And you don't want to walk away from it. This is something you kind of need to stand here. In total, it takes about maybe eight minutes. So it's not that long. Just stay here and pay attention to it. Make sure it doesn't, um, you don't want it to burn on the bottom. That's why we're whisking. You can get a helper to do it. You can get a, yes, you can get a helper to whisk some. It's definitely thickening. Okay. And you can see that because it's kind of starting to stick to the edge there. Yep. Yep. It's clumping up. Okay. It's been six minutes. Should I turn this off? So yeah, we got bubbles on the side. It's starting, it's starting to thicken. So we'll turn that off. That took about six minutes. Can I have a turn? Yeah. I need to get a feel for it. You just keep stirring here, wipe the edges, wipe the corners, and then take a rubber spatula, wipe the edges and corners to make sure it's not stuck in there and keep whisking. See how nice and thick that is. And it's, it's smooth too. Now, while it's still warm, we're going to add two teaspoons vanilla bean paste. And this is in lieu of using an actual vanilla bean. I never have one around. So I love this vanilla bean paste. Oop, that didn't go in there. What? It's teaspoon. Yeah. So two teaspoons vanilla bean paste, and this adds all those little flecks of vanilla. So it looks really pretty and it's got great flavor. So two teaspoons of that. And then we also need two tablespoons of butter. There we go. We'll whisk that into our pudding here, add our butter, melt that in. This looks so good. Smells amazing. I'm going to have a little taste here in a minute. Just to make sure we did everything right. Mmm. Yum. I'll have to get your own spoon. Okay. Now what we'll do with the filling is we're going to grab a, I just use a Pyrex. And this is another thing you can make ahead. You can make this about two days in advance. We'll just pour our pudding right into this here. You can smooth that out a little bit. And it does feel soft, but it will firm up as it cools. Doesn't that look delicious? Now we'll take some Saran wrap and press that right flush onto the top of the pudding. And this will prevent pudding skins. Now this goes in the refrigerator to chill at least two to three hours. You want it to really firm up and then we can put it in our pie crust, add some topping and we're done. I think I'll put a lid on this one and that goes in the refrigerator. All right. First step, we'll make the homemade all butter pie crust. And I'm really excited to share this one with you because I have modified my recipe just a bit. If you've been watching my channel for a while, you know, I have a pie crust recipe that I've been using for probably 20 years. And I do love that recipe, but I have made a slight modification and I'm really excited to share it with you. So what we're doing is using a little bit of self-rising flour. Self-rising flour is all purpose flour with some baking powder and some salt added to it. Specifically, every cup of self-rising flour has about one and a half teaspoons baking powder and a quarter teaspoon salt. So don't worry if you don't have self-rising flour, just use one and a half teaspoons baking powder and one quarter teaspoon salt. Very simple, but if you have self-rising flour, you can use that. And I should mention you can use all self-rising flour. I did that and it works out very well, but I think my preference is to use one cup of self-rising flour and then one quarter cup of all purpose flour. So let's do that now. And if you have questions, of course you can leave a comment and I'll be happy to help you. The exciting thing is just that adding a little bit of baking powder to the pie crust, I think adds a nice little bit of a tangy flavor. And then also the baking powder makes the pie crust puff up a little bit more and make it bake. I can't talk today. So the baking powder makes the pot pie. So the baking powder makes the pie crust puff up a little bit more and then also makes it a little bit more tender. So for those of you who have had problems with maybe a tough pie crust, this will help with that. So self-rising flour, one cup, and I will put the metric measurements on the screen and in the recipe. Thanks for watching. If you're not in, I'm in Texas, but I love all my international viewers. Next is one quarter cup of all purpose flour. And as I mentioned, so now we have the baking powder and salt already added. So we're not adding any more salt. Next step is one tablespoon sugar, and you're welcome to use anywhere from one teaspoon to one tablespoon. If you like it less sweet, I do get that question a lot. Can we use less sugar? You can. My mom liked it a little less sweet, so that's perfectly fine. We'll give this a little whisk here with my fork. I'm going to grab the butter out of the refrigerator. We leave the butter in the refrigerator until we're ready to use it because you want this butter nice and cold. The whole goal of a pie crust is to have small pieces of butter in the pie crust like this. So they're in pieces. They're not completely melted into the flour like, say, in a cookie dough. So you have small pieces of butter, and then once you roll that out, and then when the butter melts, a little bit of steam escapes, and that's what creates flakes in your pie. So you have pieces of butter that melt, which release steam, and that's what creates the flakes in your crust. So you'll see as we go through this that there are many steps we take in order to just keep the butter cold, and the first one is leave the butter in the refrigerator until you're ready to use it. Now, you also don't want to handle it a lot. I'm just going to cut it in half and then cut this in half, and this is since we are making it with our hands. I'm cutting the butter into smaller pieces so it'll be a little easier to work with. So just cutting it into some cubes here. So we're just dropping our chunks of butter here into the bowl with all of our dry ingredients. Pretty simple so far, right? Now, this is kind of fun. You're just going to, I think it's fun, we're going to just mash the pieces of butter. I'm mashing in between my thumbs. It's about all you do is you just mash them, and I think it's nice because the butter feels so cold and the flour feels so soft, and it just feels like you're, you know, playing out in a sandbox or something. So just a nice feeling. Okay, this is looking good. The butter is just kind of in all different sizes, and it's just started to mix in with the flour. We haven't added our water yet, which is the next step. If you have a specific problem with your pie crust, be sure to leave that in the comments, and I'm going to do a video on troubleshooting, so I'll be answering a lot of your questions. So let me know that. I love to hear from you, and honestly, it really does help me improve my skills as well, so thank you for that. All right, next step is to add five tablespoons cold water. Now, we'll just use a fork and kind of bring that together, just kind of toss. Okay, this looks great. Now, what you want to do to make sure it is wet enough to make a pie crust is you'll just take a little handful there and squeeze it together, and if it comes together, well, you know, you can kind of move it around, and it looks like a pie crust. Then you know you're done. If you squeeze it together and it crumbles, it's too dry, and that can be for several different reasons, and I'll go through that my troubleshooting video, but if it is a little bit too dry, you can add a drizzle and a little bit of water, about one teaspoon at a time until it starts to come together like a pie crust. Now, we're done. That was it. We made a homemade pie crust. So now I'm going to grab, I use what's called Glad Press'n Seal, and if you don't have this, you can use basic plastic wrap. We'll just take our Press'n Seal, and I know it's really loud. It sounds like some sort of wax paper or something, but it's called Press'n Seal, and it's a lot like saran wrap. So now what we'll do is just dump this out onto our saran wrap. Then I kind of bring it towards the center. Now we bring it together into a disc. There we go. Twist this together like that, and then you can shape it into your disc. Now you have a nice round disc to roll out, but first we'll need to put it in the refrigerator for at least 20 minutes. If you're finding that your dough seems tough after you bake it, leave your crust in the fridge a little bit longer, somewhere closer to an hour. That gives the gluten time to rest, and so that will make your crust a little more tender. So we'll put this in the crust. We'll put this in the refrigerator for about an hour. All right, now I did have one that I made earlier in the refrigerator. It's been in there for at least an hour, so it's ready to roll out. I'm just going to squeeze it like this, and it just presses it out into a larger disc. And now we can put a little flour on top, a little dusting there. We have a little flour underneath, and what we're going to do is roll the pie crust and turn it one quarter turn. Roll the pie crust, turn it one quarter turn. The reason we're turning it a quarter turn after each roll is really for two reasons. The first is you don't want your crust to stick to your counter or your Silpat mat, because if the crust sticks to it, it is very hard to get up. So that's number one. The second reason to turn it after each turn is because it helps keep the pie crust in a round shape. If you just are rolling all over, you probably end up with kind of a lopsided pie crust, which is not a huge deal, but this makes it easier to fit it into your pie plate when it's in a circle. So just keep rolling. Oh, turn. Roll and turn. For the pie plate, I use a basic nine inch Pyrex. So the way we measure our pie crust is to just set it on it like this, and you want to have about two inches all around. I don't quite have two inches all over, so I'm just to make sure it's as big as we want it. There we go. Make sure it's not sticking. That's good. That looks better. We've got about two inches all around. So next is to fold the pie crust in half, move our pie plate here, and then set the crust right in the middle, right on the word Pyrex, right there, and then unfold the crust like that, and that will put your pie crust right in the center. Now we're just going to gently set it into the pie plate. You're not stretching at all. If you start stretching the pie crust, it's going to want to stretch back. Looking great. And you can see that you have these ragged edges. That's totally fine. We have some cracks. That's all fine. No reason to stress. This is looking great. To make the edge, what we're going to do is take this overhang and fold it under itself and rest it on the lip of the pie plate. So going around and folding it under itself, resting it on the lip of the pie plate. You might come to a section that doesn't quite have enough to fold under, but we'll probably get to a place that has too much, and so we can just kind of repair it there. I'll show you how to do it just as we go along. So we're folding this under, fold it and rest on the lip. There we go. Now this is kind of a lot of dough over here. We have a lot, so I'll pinch a little bit off there and set it aside. Then we'll keep folding under as we do. Now we can go check this over here and see if it's a little bit. It doesn't even need that much, but we can take a little water, glue it in there, and then you just bulk it up a little bit like that. So anywhere you have a little place where it feels like there's not quite enough dough, you can patch in some. Very easy. Just fold it under like that. This looks great. And now we'll make the fluted edge. To make the fluted edge, I like to use my knuckle and two fingers. I'm going to dip my knuckle in a little bit of flour, then take these two fingers and press my knuckle between it. These two fingers and press my knuckle between it. Okay, so it's time to put the crust in a freezer. I like a really, really cold crust before it goes in the oven. So straight to the freezer. I'm going to wrap it with some press and seal gently. And again, this is one of the make-ahead tips. You can leave this in your freezer for two to three months. I would double wrap it in plastic if it's going to be in there that long. And, you know, put the date on it and what it is and leave that in your freezer, and it's ready to pull out and bake whenever you need a pie. All right, this goes in the freezer. Now we're ready to bake our pie crust. Here I have a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. I always bake my pies and my pie crusts on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper because the butter from the crust will inevitably melt down a little bit. And if you get any in the bottom of your oven, it'll start to smoke and be a big mess to clean up. So always put it on a baking sheet. That'll prevent that from hitting the bottom of your oven. For the initial bake, we'll bake at around 415 degrees. I use anywhere from 415 to 425. Basically what we're going for is a hot oven. And we want the hot oven because it's going to sear this pie crust in place. Now if you're worried about a cold plate going into a hot oven, that is a valid concern. So what we do for that is make sure it sits out about five minutes, maybe while the oven is preheating. Have it sit out and it'll take some of the chill out of this pie plate. Now we are going to blind bake this crust. And what that means is that we're baking it without any filling in it. And the problem with blind baking is that the crust will start to sink down. Normally what people do for blind baking is spread some parchment in the pie plate, add rice or beans, and bake it like that or pie weights and then bake it like that to hold up the crust. I don't like to do that. I don't have pie weights and it's just kind of a mess trying to use rice or beans. Instead, I have a new method and I can't wait for you to try this one. What you'll do is take a aluminum pie plate. You can buy these like three for a dollar at the grocery store and you can reuse them. So no special equipment. It fits right inside my nine inch pie plate. And then we're going to use an oven safe bowl right in there to hold it down. It'll hold this on place and you'll get a really nice pie crust. So 415, we'll start for about 15 minutes and then pull it out and I'll show you the next steps. All right, it sounds like the crust is ready. So I'm going to grab it out of the oven. Okay, this looks great. You can see it stayed in place all the way around, which is exactly what we wanted. Now we will take a kitchen rag and we'll just grab the aluminum pie plate and pull that right up. It comes out really easily and look how nice this crust looks. You can see the puffs and the flakes and it just looks really full. It's really beautiful. So now that we've taken that center out, we don't have anything to hold down this middle part of the crust and so it'll start to bubble up and cause other problems. So to prevent that, we're going to take a fork and just prick all the way around on the bottom here. You can do a few along the sides too because that tends to bubble up a little. It's so soft and tender and flaky. Oh, I can't wait for you to try this crust. Now we're going to put it back in at 350 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes more. And because ovens vary so much, do keep an eye on it. If it starts to look pretty golden all over, you can take it out a little early or if it needs more, leave it in a few more minutes. Of course, I did this already yesterday so I could show you the final result. Now we'll add our whipped cream. Okay, real quick, I am going to cut a slice. I know y'all really like to see it being cut. Oh, look at that. I mean, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful pie. Now we can have a taste. Looks lovely. Wouldn't this be so pretty with some strawberries on side or raspberries? Can't wait to try it. Wow, it's beautiful. Have a taste here. Oh my gosh. Wow. It is so delicious. Thanks so much for joining us on Marie's Kitchen. Today we made this easy and delicious vanilla cream pie with a homemade all butter crust with a bunch of make-ahead tips that you can use for the holidays. I can't wait to hear if you're going to try this. If you like this video, be sure to give us a thumbs up. It means so much to me and also to YouTube. Be sure to leave me a comment. Let me know what you think and let me know if you have any other questions that I didn't answer. I always love to hear from y'all. And if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe. I've got lots more videos coming up with easy recipes just like this. Tons of pie videos before the holidays and I don't want you to miss any of them. For this recipe and more, head over to my website marieseba.com. There you can go and find this recipe and all my recipes. And if you like, put them in a notebook and make your very own Marie's Kitchen cookbook for free. My goal is to give you some really easy recipes that turn out great every time so you can build some confidence in the kitchen and feel really inspired to share good food with people that you love. From my kitchen ears, thank you. One other thing I did want to show you real quick is this pie carrier. It is so great if you are going to be transporting pies. It's made by Pyrex and you can carry it just like this and the pie fits right inside. So you just take your pie, set it down here in the middle, pop this on and it won't get damaged. It's easy to carry. You don't have to have any other, you know, find a box to carry it and all that other crazy stuff that I've done before. So I do love my pie carrier. And one thing you can also do is if you're storing it in the fridge or even if it's out, you know, before you plan to serve it and you want to have a cover, you can use the same cover right on top. It fits really nicely on the pie. So I did want to show that to you. I will put this in the link. I think it's a great investment if you travel at all with pies or if you want to store it in your refrigerator and that's really great. All right. See you next time.