Sweet Potato Cream

Maybe I’m enchanted with sweet potatoes. They’re understated, and it’s good to love understated things. There is less competition and your time and effort are more likely rewarded with unique discoveries.

To be enchanted by undervalues with promises is a promise of joy. Beyond a simple boil or bake, sweet potato’s colorful, sweet, and starchy qualities tell of greater ends. The key to unlock their potential is through a slow bake to attain a saturated and sweetest potato mash. This pile of soft starch not only fills tarts and pies, but when fluffed up with fat can turn into an enticing cream for pastries and cakes.

To transform sweet potatoes into sweet potato cream, I aimed for two types of cream: a butter cream which is made with butter, and a Chantilly cream which is made with heavy cream. Whipping the fat traps air into it, transforming the solid or liquid into a light and airy billow. Then incorporate the whipped cream with the sweet potato for a sweet cream in the loveliest hues of ivory, orange, and purple.

We will add sugar to the sweet potatoes. How sweet you want it depends on your taste bud. Try 2 cups of sugar for one pound of the baked stuff, already scraped from their shells. Make a syrup by adding a half cup of water to the sugar, then heating and stirring until all of the sugar dissolves into a thick liquid. Mix the syrup into the sweet potato mash. For the orange variety, it is necessary to cook it again, stirring constantly so that more moisture evaporates until it becomes a paste. Consider using less sugar for orange sweet potatoes; it will taste sweeter as it becomes denser. While white and purple sweet potatoes have a nutty aroma, orange sweet potatoes are reminiscent of pumpkins. To flavor them, I opted for 1 tsp of cinnamon powder and 3 tbsp of dark rum. Bourbon and vanilla are just as suitable.

Now whip the fat, be it butter or heavy cream. Ensure the butter is completely softened, but not melted, and add it to the sweetened sweet potato before whisking. I used a stick, or 4 oz, of butter for half of the potato mash. You can do it by hands, whisking a tablespoon of butter at at time into the potato until a desirable consistency is achieved. I whipped up 8 oz of heavy cream for the remaining half of the potato mash. It is much faster with an electric mixer to obtain stiff peaks. Then use a flexible spatula to fold the whipped cream, a few spats at a time, into the potato until soft and fluffy.

Sweet potato butter cream is denser, good for filling macarons. Macarons are almond flour cookies sandwiching a ganache. They are fickle and delicate. To make macaron shells calls for powdered sugar and super fine almond flour, of which I don’t typically carry around. I used granulated sugar, which made shells that were not hollow, but more porous with an intensified nougat-like, chewy texture. Colorful macaron shells are mostly made with food coloring.

Sweet potato Chantilly cream is light and airy, good for decorating cakes. I used it to make cream puffs. Cream puffs are typically filled with pastry cream, but the sweet potato Chantilly cream worked beautifully here – beautiful and tastes great, but clearly I need to invest in better piping tips!

And there, you have it – tasty, rustic, homespun sweet potato cream.