About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Boston Cream Pie, is from the The Cook’s Illustrated baking book.

Boston cream pie is, when done well, truly incredible. The interesting thing is that, at least in the restaurants we go to, it’s not served much anymore. Similar to the previous project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, I last had one while traveling; in this case, on the east coast. Go figure–Boston cream pie is more common around Boston.

If you’ve never had a Boston cream pie, you can see the pictures in this post, but the general idea is this: Cake layer on the bottom. A cream layer in the middle. Another cake layer on top of that. All of this is capped off with a chocolate layer that surrounds the top cake layer and drips down the sides. So, yes, with all those layers you don’t need a large piece to get a lot of dessert.

Preparation

To be quite honest, this project was daunting to me. It had way more components than what I’m used to comfortably working with. You have to make a cake batter for two cake layers, a pastry cream, and a glaze. Each of those requires different ingredients, steps, and timing. But what the heck–it was worth a shot, and even if this failed I’d learn something.

To begin with then, once again I went the mise en place route. I only set up the ingredients for the pastry cream and the cake, with the room temperature ingredients left on the counter and the refrigerated ones left, um, in the refrigerator. There are eight total ingredients each in the cream and the cake; I used quite a few dishes just setting up.

Putting Things Together

OK, ok, so I didn’t take pictures of the pastry cream process. To be honest, while time-consuming, there’s not much to see with it. I can say that the recipe calls for straining the pastry cream through a fine-mesh strainer but, as we don’t have one of those, I skipped it. I also didn’t grease the parchment paper that you layer on the pastry cream when you put it in the fridge. Don’t tell the authors. 🙂

The cake process is pretty much what you see for most cakes. In this case, because there were two layers, I had to dig out two 9″ pans and grease and flour them. Those ended up looking like this:

Then you get to mix everything up and divide it out into the two cake pans, like so:

Then throw those suckers in the oven and wait for them to bake. And, if you’re me, you release the breath you’ve been holding because you actually finished preparing two of the three components of the recipe. The pastry cream is chilling, the batters are cooking, and you don’t have to do anything but wait to pull the cakes out of the oven. Here’s the results of the bake:

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Now here’s the painful part: You have to get those cakes out of the pans and onto the wire racks. Cake #1 came out beautifully:

The second cake needed some more gentle prying and words of frustration to come out.

All in all, anyways, it wasn’t too bad. I did make a mistake here, though: I used the second cake as the top layer, and the first cake as the bottom layer. You’ll see why that’s a problem here shortly.

After all this, you finally get to put the glaze on. That’s a quick three ingredient setup so, apart from chopping some chocolate beforehand, I didn’t bother with mise en place. You pour the glaze on the cake, chill it, and end up with–ta-da!–a Boston cream pie.

Now, it’s a little tricky to see here, but there are a couple bumps on the top of that pie. If I had uploaded a clearer photo, you would have seen a LOT of bumps–all because that one cake didn’t release cleanly and I didn’t get the glaze smoothed out enough. Lesson 1 learned.

There was a Lesson 2 that followed soon after. The pie didn’t look quite right to me until I looked back at the cookbook. That’s when I realized I’d missed part of the distinctive Boston cream pie look: The chocolate glaze should be smooth and almost completely cover the top cake around the edges. OK, so loss of points on the pretty factor there. You can see this better from this side shot.

The Verdict

And now, of course, we get to the point where the judges (the wife and the boys) lets me know how it tastes. They’re of course kinder than real judges, so I appreciate that.

The wife thought the pie looked pretty nice, and really enjoyed the taste. Our oldest son also loved it (though we limited the size of his piece–like I said at the start, this thing’s tall with all its levels). Overall, after two days and between two adults and two little ones, there’s probably about one-third left. That’s a thumbs up to me.

Personally, it is not the best Boston cream pie I’ve ever had. I didn’t expect it to be–there are ways to make finer cakes, use better ingredients, and of course it’s hard to overestimate the value of having made something more than once (which I hadn’t here). The point of this, and most of the other projects I’m posting, is this, though: I did it, and it was fun! I’m not the best baker in the world, so this points out something else: You can make this too. It takes time, and effort, but give it a shot.

To tempt you a little further to try it, here’s a cutaway view of the final product. Mmmmm . . .

Have a great week!