Better than Bouillon is paste-textured reduced stock. It's gloopy, not very pretty, and adds excellent flavor to just about any savory dish. Instead of water and BTB, you could use a prepared stock, or instead of just the BTB, use a bouillon cube, but I find they have dramatically inferior flavors unless you make your own stock at home. I haven't tried cooking down a batch of homemade stock to see if I could get paste, but I think it would probably take too long.

I guess on the cream until the color looks about right. I use less cream if I overshot on the water when I was cooking the veggies, more if it's a little too thick.

"A ton" of garlic means "lots, to taste". I'd put one bulb in a batch of cauliflower soup mostly because it's convenient to grab one bulb out of a bag of garlic bulbs. If you're that enthusiastic about garlic, go ahead and use two, three, four - it's kind of hard to overdo something that wonderful.