This is a big food weekend; Passover Seders and Easter extravaganzas will abound. As always, I encourage you to simplify your life, and bake a pie that is really a cake: Boston cream pie.
We had neighbors who did not celebrate family birthdays with cakes – instead they always had pie – and sometimes store-bought pie, to boot. Somehow blowing the candles out on a dowdy, brown, deep-dish apple pie was never appealing to me. I always thought their behavior was edging deep into the grasses of the lunatic fringe, but now I realize that we have been baking Boston Cream Pies for birthdays and major family celebrations for YEARS! We probably haven’t baked a proper birthday cake since the year I pieced together Thomas the Tank Engine and some of his friends, for the five-year old birthday boy, who is now out of college and is engaged to be married. Once again my hypocrisy and quick moral high road are being questioned.
Though Boston cream pie is indeed a cake, with two layers and a custard filling, that is covered with chocolate icing. It was created for the Boston Parker House Hotel by Armenian-French chef M. Sanzian. It is the official dessert of Boston! It is a fun fact and good to know in case you are considering moving based on your love of regional foods. Boston is much closer than Aix-en-Provence.
Of course we take every shortcut known to science in the kitchen, and the BCP is an eager co-conspirator. If there isn’t time to bake the cake from scratch, it is easy to substitute a quick mix from Betty Crocker. If you haven’t yet mastered a decent crème pâtissière, then yummy custard filling can be made from Jell-O instant vanilla pudding. And the icing? It is the easiest thing ever, and the shiny patina makes even the most rudimentary baker look as skilled as the Best Amateur Baker in the Great British Bake Off. You will be a rock star. Now bake!
Although baking is a science as we are often admonished, sometimes you have to improvise. I do not use the entire batch of batter for a Boston cream pie. After I make the batter, whether homemade, or as I have suggested whipped up slyly from a cake mix, I only use about 2/3 of the batter. In my mind a BCP should not stand as tall as a two-layer layer-cake. The other third I pour into a couple of cupcake papers and leave out to keep the circling cake samplers at bay.
I line a spring form pan with parchment paper, and pour the cake batter into the pan, which I then place on top of a cookie sheet, and bake according to directions. After the cake has baked, and cooled, I slice it into two rounds, using a long bread knife so I don’t hack the cake to bits. (Martha suggested using dental floss to split cake into layers once. I cannot recommend this method, unless you are a very experienced ceramic artist. I could not achieve a straight line – it wobbled and looked like corrugated tin.)
Crème Pat – as they like to say on the BBC – courtesy of Martha Stewart
1 cup milk
3 large egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
In a small saucepan, bring the milk to a boil over medium heat. Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks and sugar together in a small bowl. Add flour, and mix until smooth and free of lumps.
Thin egg-yolk mixture with approximately 1/4 cup of warm milk. When remaining milk begins to boil, add it to egg-yolk mixture, and stir well. Return to saucepan, and place over high heat. Cook, whisking constantly, until pastry cream thickens and boils, about 1 minute. (Turning the pan as you whisk helps to easily reach all areas of pan.)
Reduce heat to medium, and cook, whisking constantly, until cream becomes shiny and easier to stir, about 2 minutes more. Pour into a bowl, and stir in vanilla. Place plastic wrap directly on surface of pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming, and allow to cool.
https://www.marthastewart.com/316410/creme-patissiere
Or you can default to Jell-O Instant Vanilla Pudding. No one will mind. (Not even our houseguest, who works for Bon Appétit magazine!)
Artfully trowel on a good thick layer of the Crème Pat (or the vanilla pudding) on the bottom half of the pie and carefully replace the top half.
You cannot change one speck of this magic chocolate glaze! I have been using this glaze since 1989. The cookbook always falls open to this page, which is also the glaze I use for Flourless Chocolate Cake. It is covered with crumbs and splatters from the festivities from the last 26 years.
3 ounces semisweet chocolate
3 ounces unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon brandy or bourbon
Melt the chocolate and butter together over a low heat, stirring until smooth. Stir in the brandy. Pour over the top of the cooled cake, smoothing with a spatula, and let it drip down the sides.
(The glaze recipe is from Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts, which I cannot find digitized or linked to any place on.)
Here is the link to the Spring Forth Cake from a couple of weeks ago: https://chestertownspy.org/2015/03/20/food-friday-spring-forth-with-cake/
And here is a short history of BCP: https://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Cakes/BostonCreamPie.htm
Cover and put in the fridge. Uncover and let the glaze warm up a bit before serving – this will bring the shine back to the chocolate glaze. And sit back and bask in the glory. Hop on down the bunny trail. Yumsters.
“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
― David Mamet
Bill Anderson says
Which sane persons would prefer Boston cream pie over a couple handfuls of ordinary old jelly beans? Certainly no true American! So, Jean Sanders, feel free to invite me to your house to collect and properly dispose of your unwanted jelly beans.
Jean Sanders says
Oh, Bill. I was just trying to prove how grown up and mature I am. There is a big stash of jelly beans in a bowl on a table that I pass between my studio and the kitchen. I can test those jelly beans going to and fro,hither and yon, and until the cows come home and I often do. Shhh. I just don’t serve them after dinner…