ABC - Boston Cream Pie

Orange-flavored Boston Cream Pie

This month's ABC project is Boston Cream Pie. Guess what? It's not really a pie. It's a cake. As a matter of fact, it's Massachusetts' official state dessert and it has its own Wikipedia page. When I saw the Boston Cream Pie recipe on the King Arthur Flour website, I knew I had to make it. The cake looked so soft and fluffy, the pastry cream so silky smooth, and the chocolate glaze so luscious. Then when I baked it, and ran into issues, it started to look like it was going to be the cake from hell (that just looked pretty to lure you in). I'm exaggerating a bit, of course, but I did run into issues, so my problem solving brain already started thinking of a Plan B and came up with a Boston Cream "Trifle" if things went really wrong :o)

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.

As you might know, I love orange-flavored baked goods. So I thought I'd incorporate orange zest in the cake batter as well as the pastry cream which worked really well.

I decided to divvy up the batter into 2 pans (thinking it would save me the hassle of cutting the cake into 2 equal layers later). I'm not sure what happened, but it turned into 2 layers of orange-flavored gumminess. I figured that maybe my bleached cake flour was too weak to hold/absorb all the liquid in the batter (which was 50% more than the previous BCP recipe that I made which came from Tish Boyle's "The Cake Book"). This book also holds my favorite pastry cream recipe, to which I added some orange zest and a pinch of salt.

It was still early in the day, I had already made the orange-flavored pastry cream, and I still had 3 eggs in the fridge. Off I went. This time I used 5 oz of bleached all-purpose flour and 1 oz of bleached cake flour. I decided to bake it in my 9" spring form pan because of the 2" height requirement. After seeing Penny's ABC post, I could have used my Chicago Metallic 9" pan. Anyway, after 30 minutes, the cake was a deep golden brown. Thinking it was done early, I checked it by touching the top of the cake, only to find out that it was still completely soupy on the inside. Back into the oven it went for the additional 20 minutes.

After removing the cake from the oven, the cake looked fine. But as it cooled, it sank a little bit in the middle. Thanks to our cold MN weather, my cake had cooled completely in about 45 minutes. Assembling the cake was going to be really easy and straightforward, until I noticed that the bottom of my cake had a thin layer of gummy spots in it. I shaved off about 1/8" from the bottom and carried on.

A nice and moist crumb despite the long baking time. Can you see the specks of orange zest?

A nice slather of orange-specked pastry cream

The top of the cake wasn't even, so I leveled it.

The chocolate glaze came together quickly. After tasting some of the cake crumbs, I felt the cake was still a bit on the sweet side, despite my 1/4 cup sugar reduction. So I decided to use some good quality dark European chocolate to offset some of that sweetness. To make for a slightly thicker glaze, I reduced the amount of cream by about 1 Tbsp.

The cake is ready for its chocolate bath :o)

A little decorative swirl on top

A slice of BCP heaven, minus a thin layer of the bottom. Bon appetit!

Final thoughts/tips:

• We had this cake with our friends and their kids. Everyone loved it. Comments were made about the orange-y notes in the dessert. The ratings varied from 8 out of 10 to 9 out of 10. Hubby liked it too and gave it a good 8.5 out of 10.
• I liked the combination of flavors and textures in the cake. I'm especially fond of the orange/chocolate combo. The top half of the cake was fluffier than the bottom half where the crumb was a bit tighter. The chocolate glaze had a deep chocolate flavor and was soft even straight from the fridge. If given a choice, I prefer the first BCP recipe I ever made which is the one from The Cake Book.
• To cut this dessert into neat slices, I dipped my knife in a tall glass of hot water and wiped the knife clean after each slice.
• Step-by-step pictures for this recipe as well as the recipe itself can be found on the KAF website, HERE.
• Don't forget to check out the Boston Cream Pie of all the other ABC bakers.