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I found a recipe for an orange flavored Bavarian cream with the following directions.

Start with a crème anglaise by whisking egg yolks and sugar and then add boiling milk flavored with orange zest. Put the mixture back on the heat and -- here comes the fishy part -- add fresh orange juice and let everything thicken.

Then it continues to add softened gelatine, let cool and add whipped cream. But this makes sense.

How is a mixture so liquid supposed to thicken? Is this the right procedure to make a flavored Bavarian cream?

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    You ask about proportions, but don't give any numbers. That means we can only speculate
    – Chris H
    Mar 25, 2018 at 20:24
  • I didn't :) was hoping to have a feel for how much sense these directions had. Adding whipped cream to a liquid cream might not make much sense, but after gelatine is added to the latter, maybe it does.
    – David P
    Mar 26, 2018 at 7:35

1 Answer 1

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The egg yolks can thicken the liquid when you heat it, like in a standard egg custard (the home made version, not the one made from custard powder). But this is a fairly tricky procedure: if you heat it too much the mixture will separate. So best done on a double boiler ('bain marie').

And in addition, you have the whipped cream and the gelatine, which will help thicken the mixture on cooling*. I suspect that there's also a prescribed time in the refrigirator...

(*: as I've been taught, the swollen gelatine is first dissolved in a small amount of liquid, and the whipped cream is mixed with the rest when the gelatine just starts to set)

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    Also: a crème anglaise is supposed to flow, like cream, rather than set, like a baked custard or flan. Mar 25, 2018 at 14:23
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    Pure crème anglaise, yes, indeed. But then, you don't add gelatine to it.
    – remco
    Mar 25, 2018 at 14:56
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    I know; the recipe starts with a crème anglaise and I wanted to emphasize to him that at that stage it would only be a bit thicker than cream. Mar 25, 2018 at 15:54

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