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.

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, Baltimore Berger Cookies, is from King Arthur Flour. You can find the recipe here.

I’ve had to travel sometimes as part of my job. When I was a contractor for a systems integrator, this meant traveling to different places in the U.S. Moving into the non-contractor world, the rare travel situations have been to other countries.

No matter how good or bad a trip to another country is, the food experiences are always interesting. Lots of people rave about incredible dinners, but on a trip to Finland a couple of years ago I enjoyed breakfast far more. The overall amount, variety, and quality of food was excellent, but one little item became a favorite morning treat. It was a crisp cookie which had a fairly basic dough flavor, but was half dipped in chocolate. The crunch of it, the smooth chocolate taste, were a nice little sugar rush to wake my jetlagged behind up.

I felt weird doing it, but I took a picture of one of those cookies. I was unable to find anything about it online once I got back, and I couldn’t find any recipe that really looked like it. That is, until King Arthur Flour published in their magazine Sift about favorite foods in different states. And lo and behold–Baltimore had something called a Berger cookie that looked darned close to what I ate in Finland. Of course, that meant I had to make it to see if it actually was similar.