"boston cream pie" news and stories

It's Super Bowl Dessert day here at Slashfood, which means for the Slashfood Bowl, we're talking about Boston Cream Pie for the New England Patriots.

Though it's called "pie," the Boston Cream Pie is actually a layer cake filled with pastry cream and covered with a chocolate ganache. Why it's called a pie, we can't be sure, but reliable sources (and by "reliable" I mean I googled it) say that it was likely because pie tins were more readily available than cake pans to bake the cake layers.

I've only tasted the cake twice, and both times, I wondered why I didn't eat this cake more often. I mean, come on. It has pastry cream in the middle and is topped with chocolate that drips down the sides. Alright, I'll be honest with you all. I basically love the cake for that pastry cream.

There's no way I can let this day slide, since I'm from Boston. The Boston Cream Pie actually was invented in Boston, at the Parker House Hotel, which is also where they invented the Parker House Roll. But that would be another post.

It was invented by a chef named Sanzian, and is the official dessert of Massachusetts. It's called a pie but it's actually a cake. That link has a basic recipe for Boston Cream Cakes from 1879, but here's a more complex version. Here's another recipe from Yankee magazine.

Did you know that states have "official" foods. Yup, and Massachusetts is no exception. The foods include Boston Cream Pie, cranberries, baked beans, chocolate chip cookies, and corn muffins (corn muffins?).

Gridskipper takes that list of foods and tells us what restaurants in Boston serve the best ones. For example, though Boston Cream Pie was invented at the Omni Parker House Hotel (also home of the Parker House Rolls), you can get the best one at The Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel. For beans, head on over to the Blue Ribbon BBQ. They're not traditional baked beans, but they're great (and I can vouch for this place - best BBQ I've ever had. If they were closer to my house I'd probably eat there twice a week).

[thanks to Jade Walker]

Hey, today is National Pie Day!

The American Pie Council calls pie "the ultimate comfort food," and I bet a lot of people would agree with that. So what should you do to celebrate National Pie Day? Well, the first thing you should do, of course, is eat pie. And then maybe you can enter the 2007 APC Crisco National Pie Championships. Or maybe you could perform random acts of pieness, by sharing a pie that you bake. And there are many other ways to mark the day, including pie sales, contests, teaching, and singing pie songs.

Pie songs?

The pie above is Chocolate Death Pie, and the recipe is here.