This was my birthday cake, too. I'm not sure my mom made her own pastry cream, or if she used vanilla pudding mix. Or maybe she borrowed some pastry cream out of the walk-in at the cafeteria; we made lots of pies, so there was pretty much always pastry cream on hand--and they made it in HUGE batches (43 eggs, 4 gallons milk, etc.)! (I'm glad to find a pastry cream recipe here, though, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to scale that gigantic recipe down to something that makes sense.)

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