Vegan Praliné Pastry Cream

Preheat the oven to 350° while you gather your ingredients.

Toast the nuts.

• Place the hazelnuts and almonds together in a single layer on a baking tray. Toast them in the oven for about 10 minutes.
• Remove them from the oven and allow them to cool for a few minutes. Once they have cooled. Pour the nuts onto a kitchen towel. Fold the towel in half and rub your hands back and forth over the towel to break the skins off of the hazelnuts. They don't need to be 100% skin free. Pick out the nuts and place back onto the baking tray.

Make the caramel.

• Pour the sugar into a saucepan on medium heat. Continue to heat until the sugar melts and turns an amber color. Do not leave it unattended. Caramel can go from perfectly amber to dark and scorched very quickly. It will taste very bitter if burned and will smell smokey, too.

  TIP: To make your life easier, fill the pot with water and turn the heat on high to get the water boiling. The caramel bits will dissolve into the water and will make dumping it out and cleaning it way easier. This also applies if you burned your caramel and have a chunk of burned sugar just sitting at the bottom of the pan!
• Lay out the silicone baking mat onto a flat surface.
• Pour the nuts into the caramel while it is still hot. Mix them around briefly with a rubber spatula to coat them in the caramel. Then scoop out the mixture onto the silicone mat in one layer. You are going to be smashing it, which will be difficult if you have one whole clump of hard caramel and nuts.
  
• While the mixture is cooling down, make the pastry cream.

Make the pastry cream.

• Do this step first to avoid running around to get it together when the time comes! (We say it in every recipe!) Place a medium or large sieve over a mixing bowl. Set aside the butter in one tablespoon pieces.
  
• Add the soy milk, vanilla extract, and pinch of salt to a small sauce pan. Mix to combine and leave to simmer on medium heat. It will simmer pretty quickly, in a few minutes.
  
• In a small or medium-sized mixing bowl, combine the sugar, cornstarch, and Just Egg. Mix with a whisk until evenly combined.
  
• Once the milk mixture has started to simmer, slowly whisk in half of it into the Just Egg mixture.
  
• Next, slowly whisk in all of the mixture from the mixing bowl back into the pot with the remaining milk mixture. Whisk continuously on medium heat to cook and thicken the mixture. It should be thick enough to see the streaks of the whisk in it.
  
• Turn off the heat. Scoop the mixture from the pot into the sieve you prepared earlier. Using a rubber spatula, press it through the sieve to get rid of any lumps in the mix. Don’t forget to scrape the outside bottom of the sieve to get any of the mix that collects there.
  
• Mix in one tablespoon of butter at a time while the mixture is still warm. The butter should melt and incorporate into the pastry cream. Cover with plastic wrap touching the surface of the pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming. Allow to cool in the fridge while you make the praline paste.
  

Make the praline paste.

• Using a hammer or a heavy rolling pin, break the caramelized nuts into pieces that your food processor can handle. You can cover the nuts with the same towel from earlier if you're worried about sending pieces flying all over.
• Blend the mix until it turns into a rough powder. Then keep mixing and scraping the sides down as needed until it turns into a paste. The oils released from the nuts is what makes the powder turn into paste.

  NOTE: If you see any relatively large nut pieces that did not break down, pick them out (and eat them–they're tasty!). They will clog your piping bag tip in the final cream.
  

Make the praliné pastry cream.

• Get your pastry cream from the refrigerator and mix in 1/3 cup of the praline paste.
  
• Mix the two until they are well combined and then transfer the mixture into a piping bag for the Paris-Brest, or cover again with plastic wrap and place in the fridge. Use this pastry cream in any way you'd like!