Éclair Cake Recipe

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Why it works

Replacing the instant pudding with an airy mixture of whipped cream and vanilla bean-infused pastry cream makes for a more complex-tasting filling.
Coating the top of the éclair cake with a semi-sweet chocolate ganache instead of a ready-made frosting balances the dessert with a pleasant bittersweetness.

A classic éclair is a fancy confection of golden choux pastry cream-filled and chocolate glazed, but the thing most people think of when they hear ” éclair cake ” is decidedly less formal: an iced cake in which graham crackers are topped with boxed pudding mix, refrigerated until softened, then topped with store-bought chocolate frosting.

That’s great, and we enjoy an easy dessert that can feed a crowd while requiring literally no investment of time or skill to prepare the whole thing. But if you need a recipe for how to fill a baking dish with boxed pudding, boxed crackers, and boxed icing, then we have a really great boiling water recipe to show you next! No, it’s Serious Eats, so we’re not going to do that. We’re going to be fair A little more ambitious – just enough to turn something extremely mundane into something still relatively easy but significantly more delicious.

Serious Eating / Jen Causey

Instead of instant pudding, we use an airy mixture of whipped cream and vanilla bean-infused custard. To sound fancy, we could use the French terms “crème pâtissière” for the custard and “crème light” for the mixture of the custard with the whipped cream, but in the spirit of this unapologetically Americanized dessert, we’ll stick to English here, thank you very much, brother.

For those who came here expecting boxed pudding mix, don’t run away just yet! We promise, custard may seem like the kind of thing that requires a culinary school degree, but it’s so simple and so much better. You can do it, and now is the time.

Serious Eating / Jen Causey

As for chocolate, we skip the ready-made icing and opt instead for a simple semi-sweet ganache, which brings a pleasant bitterness that balances the dessert. “Ganache” is another word that may send some running to the aisle nearest to 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 a ganache. (Actually, if you do this, you will, by definition, have made ganache. It’s easy, promise.)

Graham crackers are still graham crackers: we get it, the great ease of this recipe is that it requires no baking, and we stand by that.