Boston Cream Pie 20

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A BOSTON CREAM PIE is a curious dessert, for it is not a pie at all, but a cake that allegedly had its origins in the mid-1800s. Pies, both savory and sweet, were everyday foods then, and Bo Friberg, in The Professional Pastry Chef, suggests that it was more common for colonists in New England to own pie pans than cake pans. He traces the Boston Cream Pie to an 1855 recipe published in a New York newspaper for a powdered sugar-topped "pudding pie cake." We do know that the chocolate-glazed Boston Cream Pie had its origins at the Parker House Hotel in Boston in 1856. Whatever its true origins, I'm completely okay with a cake that has a lot of features of an eclair and is called a pie. for a number of years, Boston Cream Pie was a very popular flavor, spawning cake mixes, doughnuts, toaster strudels, yogurt, and ice cream. For this past Valentine's Day, I decided to make this Boston Cream Pie for Tom in one of my vintage heartshaped cake pans. Unlike most Boston Cream Pie recipes, this one is gluten-, dairy-, soy-, and corn-free. It features coconut prominently in its many forms-flour, cream, milk, and oil-and I believe I like it better than the dairy version. There is a bit of cooling that goes on in this recipe: The cake layer must cool before filling it with the cooked pastry cream, which must be cooled as well. I took advantage of the sub-zero temperature on my front porch to cool the components with lightning speed. That night, nestled around the fireplace, we enjoyed a slice of the best pie. (Or was it cake?)