Bostini Cream Pie for the Daring Bakers

This is the first recipe I have prepared for the Daring Bakers, a blogging community devoted to the delight and edification of all bakers who dare, or would like to dare a bit more. This month’s recipe was selected by Mary of Alpineberry. Have a look at our blogroll, to see how everyone has interpreted this recipe.
It is a deconstruction of the dessert commonly called Boston Cream Pie, another misleadingly-named food, along with Zuppa Inglese (neither English nor soup). Boston cream pie is not a pie, nor has it any historic connection to Boston, apocryphal claims of the Omni Hotel megalith to the contrary.

I am grateful to have been challenged to make a recipe I would have been unlikely to select for myself, because of the prodigal amount of cream and yolks, and the use of cornstarch as a thickener.

For many years I thought this was the only worthwhile use of cornstarch, but I have come around of late to appreciate this unfashionable ingredient (I also use a cornstarch slurry in sauces for Chinese vegetables like these baby bok choi). The pudding is the star in this dessert, and immoderate as the recipe seems, all elements are in perfect balance. Each of the three components is easy to make in itself, and you may assemble them as simply or elaborately as you wish. The alert reader will note that lots of eggs go into the cake and pudding. The pudding recipe calls for one egg and nine (lordy, nine) yolks and the cake takes eight whites and three yolks, giving us a net of four extra yolks. I now have four whites from this recipe and four from the maple sugar cookies to reckon with. In the blogger labels below this recipe is listed under “4 yolks,” and I will similarly file other recipes with a yolk or white surplus so you can find them easily when you have extra whites or yolks on hand.

Bostini Cream Pie
(from Donna Scala & Kurtis Baguley of Bistro Don Giovanni and Scala's Bistro)
Makes 8 very generous servings

Vanilla Pudding
3/4 cup whole milk
2 3/4 tablespoons cornstarch
1 whole egg, beaten
9 egg yolks, beaten
3 3/4 cups heavy whipping cream
1/2 vanilla bean (I use bourbon vanilla beans)
1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon sugar

Combine the milk and cornstarch in a bowl; blend until smooth. Whisk in the whole egg and yolks, beating until smooth. Combine the cream, vanilla bean and sugar in a saucepan and carefully bring to a boil. When the mixture just boils, whisk a ladleful into the egg mixture to temper it, then whisk this back into the cream mixture. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Strain the custard and pour into 8 wineglasses. Refrigerate to chill.

Orange Chiffon Cake

5 ounces flour
3/4 cup superfine sugar
1 1/3 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup canola oil
1/3 cup beaten egg yolks (3 to 4 yolks)
3/4 cup fresh orange juice (juice from 2 and ½ oranges)
1 1/2 tablespoons grated orange zest (zest from 3 medium oranges)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup egg whites (about 8 large)
1 teaspoon cream of tartar

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line a 12 by 17 inch half-sheet pan with parchment. Brush the parchment and the sides of the pan with oil and dust with flour.
Sift the cake flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Add the oil, egg yolks, orange juice, zest and vanilla. Stir until smooth, but do not overbeat.

Beat the egg whites until frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat until soft peaks form. Gently fold the beaten whites into the orange batter. Pour the batter into the prepared sheet pan and spread it gently to fill the corners.
Bake 18 minutes, or until the cakes bounce back when lightly pressed with your fingertip. Do not overbake. Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack. Cover the cake to keep it moist.

Chocolate Glaze

8 ounces semi or bittersweet chocolate
8 ounces unsalted butter

Chop the chocolate into small pieces. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a steel bowl over hot water, or simple let the bowl rest near the hot oven while your cake is baking. Stir the glaze well and allow it to cool slightly.

Assembly
Use a biscuit cutter of the same circumference as your wineglasses to cut the cake into little rounds. Place one or two cake rounds in each glass and pour or spoon over the chocolate glaze.

I cannot believe I have eaten one of these every day since I made them.

The Omni Hotel what?

Sorry about that. There are legends that this dessert was first made at the Parker House Hotel, and the chain that has acquired the Parker House has been trying to make the most of these, but recipes for the dessert predate the hotel’s existence.

Maple Sugar Cookies

I have been extending my Canada sojourn virtually, first by attending the Ukranian Wave festival of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance here in New York, and now by making these cracking good maple sugar cookies in celebration of our dazzling local leafage. I looked at Maida Heatter’s sugar cookie recipe, and a few others, and then I used this very handy food blog search gadget to find this recipe over at The Old Foodie:

Maple Sugar Cookies
One cup of sugar, one cup of crushed maple sugar, one cup of butter, two well beaten eggs, two tablespoons of water, two teaspoons of baking powder, and flour enough to roll out. Do not make too stiff. Bake in a quick oven.
[The Good Housekeeping Woman's Home Cook Book; c1909.]

This is very close to what I ended up doing. I substituted coconut oil for the butter since these are for a dairy-free event, and I added extra yolks to make up for the lost butteryness. I also added some vanilla and maple extracts, which you can certainly leave out, but I do have this bottle of maple extract, and the last time I used it was seventeen years ago when I made this cake:

Those are the actual opening chords of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, a particularly difficult piece to render in chocolate. I don’t know if you can tell from a seventeen-year-old Polaroid, but click for the full-size image to read the notes.

These cookies are quite sweet, perfect with milk or coffee, and your house will smell like a sugar shack for days.

Maple Sugar Cookies

1 pound flour (about 4 cups)

½ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup coconut oil (8 ounces)

1 cup granulated maple sugar (5.5 ounces)

1 cup white sugar (7 ounces)

2 tablespoons water (not sure why this is needed)

1 egg

4 egg yolks

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract (optional)

½ teaspoon maple extract (optional)

Heat the oven to 400. Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder. Cream the coconut oil with the sugars. Beat in the egg and yolks, the water, and the extracts, if you are using them. Mix in the flour, scraping down the sides. This will make a beautiful satiny dough. Chill the dough briefly, but not as long as you would chill a dough made with butter, just twenty minutes or so. Divide the dough into batches and roll ¼ inch thick. Cut with maple leaf-shaped cutters or plain biscuit cutters. Place the cookies on parchment-lined sheets and freeze them for about twenty minutes. I add this extra step of freezing the rolled cookies whenever I make cookies with coconut oil, since such cookies will spread during baking more than butter cookies. Bake them, two sheets at a time, for about 15 minutes for large cookies, slightly less for smaller cookies.

The Yiddish word for maple tree is נעזבױם (nezboym)
The Yiddish word for maple sugar is קליאָנצוקער (klyon tsuker)

I tried to make naturally colored sugar to decorate the cookies by adding a few drops each of yellow carrot juice, orange carrot juice, and beet juice to separate batches of granulated sugar. You can see from the photo that the resulting decorative sugar was too pale to be worth the effort. Has anyone had better luck coloring sugar? Any wild ideas?

Challahsaurus חלהזאַװער

At least one member of my family is much more likely to eat food if it is shaped like a dinosaur, and I understand he is not entirely alone in this position. The key challah discussion made me think of other shapes that might be interesting and appropriate for other shabosim of the year and it seemed that a challahsaurus, or khalezaver, would be particularly well-suited to shabes emor, when we read that the olive oil bread consumed in the temple was to be “lekhem-azkore” or “dinosaur-bread” (or possibly “memorial-bread;” translations differ, or at least they do now).

חלהזאַװער Challahsaurus

¾ cup warm water

3 packets active dry yeast

4 ½ eggs (leave over part of one egg for the glaze)

4 yolks (so that you have about 10 ounces eggs and yolks, combined. You can make it more or less yolky depending on your plans for the whites)

1/4 cup olive oil

¼ cup honey

6 ½ cups flour (30-32 ounces)

4 teaspoons kosher salt

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add eggs, oil, honey, flour and salt and work into a still dough. Knead the dough for about fifteen minutes and allow it to rise, covered, in a warmish place until doubled. Punch down the dough. At this point you can begin shaping the loaves, or allow the dough to rise overnight in the refrigerator.

Divide the dough into two portions, one twice the size of the other. The larger portion is for the challahsaurus. With the rest you may make your second challah in the shape of your choice.

Heat the oven t0 350F.

Divide the larger dough piece into six balls, two large, two medium, and two small. Roll the the dough balls into six ropes.

Use aluminum foil to make a dinosaur-shaped (sort of L-shaped) armature for your baking pan. Lay the two shorter dough ropes across the lower leg of the “L”. These will be your dinosaur legs.
Now braid together the remaining four ropes so that parts of the longest pieces extend out of either end of the braid. These will be Dino’s head and tail.

Lay the dinosaur-braid over the legs so that the head is resting on the upper leg of the aluminum-foil armature. Make eyes with pumpkin seeds or whatever is handy. Shape your second challah, and brush both challahs with egg glaze, made with the half-egg remaining from the dough and a teaspoon of water.

Bake the challahs to a deep golden brown. This will take about 25 minutes. You may need to remove one of your oven racks to make room for everyone to stand up.

Ooh! I just can’t wait. You can make a dinosaur challah from this pumpkin challah recipe as well.