No-Bake Rice Cake Napoleon (161 Cal per Slice)
Nutrition
A napoleon is layers of pastry holding a thick custard, and nearly all the calories are in the pastry: butter, flour, more butter. This one leaves the pastry out. Plain rice cakes go in broken up, the custard soaks into them overnight, and by morning they're soft enough to cut with a fork.
The custard is 400 ml of milk, two yolks and two tablespoons of cornstarch. No butter, no sugar. Stir it without walking away for the full ten minutes, or the starch seizes into lumps you can't whisk out. Then press cling film flat onto the surface while it cools, or you'll get a skin, and the skin stays as a rubbery sheet inside the finished cake.
A slice is 161 calories and weighs about 125 g. The same weight of a custard-filled éclair is 418 in the USDA database. Half of that gap is one swap: 70 g of rice cakes carry 259 calories, 70 g of baked puff pastry carries 391. The other half is the custard, which has no butter and no sugar in it. Same idea as the protein syrniki - keep the dessert, change the part that costs the most.
Don't rush the fridge. At an hour and a half the crumbs in the middle are still crunchy, and it eats like cereal in custard. Left overnight, it cuts in clean layers.
Ingredients
- 1 2/3 cups (400 ml) 2% or 2.5% milk
- 2 tbsp (15 g) cornstarch
- 2 large egg yolks
- 1 1/2 tbsp granulated sweetener (stevia-erythritol blend, or any 1:1 sweetener)
- 1 g vanillin (one sachet), or 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2.5 oz (70 g) plain rice cakes, about 8
Instructions
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Step 1: Pour the milk into a saucepan
Use a wide pan rather than a tall one. More surface area means the custard thickens evenly and you stir less.
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Step 2: Whisk in the egg yolks
Add them to the cold milk, before any heat. Drop yolks into warm milk and they scramble.
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Step 3: Add the cornstarch, sweetener and vanillin
Whisk until there are no dry pockets left. Vanillin is concentrated: 1 g is the dose for 400 ml of milk, and a heaped teaspoon is about four times that.
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Step 4: Set it over medium-low heat and stir
Keep the spoon moving across the bottom of the pan the whole time.
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Step 5: Cook about 10 minutes until thick
It's ready when the spoon leaves a track that holds for a second before closing.
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Step 6: Press cling film onto the surface and cool completely
Film flat against the custard, not stretched over the rim, so no skin forms.
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Step 7: Crush the rice cakes and lay the first layer
Break them by hand into pieces the size of a fingernail. Cover the base of a container.
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Step 8: Spread a third of the custard
Push it into the gaps between the pieces. That's what glues the layer together.
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Step 9: Second layer of crumbs
Same again, pressed down lightly.
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Step 10: Spread the rest of the custard
Level the top with the back of a spoon.
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Step 11: Scatter crumbs on top and chill
Ninety minutes at the very least. Leave it overnight if you want it to cut in clean layers.
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