Almond Joy Boston Cream Pie
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I hate to waste food. HATE it. I will literally eat leftovers that are on the verge of spoiling, even things that I didn’t like very much in the first place, rather than throw them out. (Of course, my ideal solution to that problem is to make Jason eat them instead, but sometimes he outsmarts me and sticks me with leftover duty instead.)
So because I am apparently a child of the Great Depression, whenever I have ingredients left over from other projects, I try to find ways to use them in other recipes instead of throwing them out. This sometimes makes me feel like a virtuous food ninja, but sometimes it’s a little silly, like when I made several batches of Swiss meringue buttercream recently and was scrambling to find something to do with over a dozen egg yolks.
I became a curd and pastry cream-making machine, cranking out my yolk-based desserts recipes rather than toss a few of the yolks. (Now, whether this is actually financially responsible is another question, since I ended up adding a bunch of butter, cream, sugar, and other expensive ingredients to my $.50-cent yolks…but that’s another blog post for another time.)
My original plan for the pastry cream was a crème brulee tart in puff pastry, which taught me a few important lessons: there is no easy way to brulee a tart top without burning the crust too, and anything you try is bound to either a) fail b) burn your fingers or c) probably both.
Back to the drawing board! I now had pastry cream languishing in my fridge, threatening to go bad, which was even more guilt-inducing than plain egg yolks. Finally, I hit on the idea of a Boston cream pie. Hallelujah, my pastry cream found a home at last!
Boston cream pie should win some sort of award for Best Deceptive Name, Dessert Category. It is in fact not a pie at all, but rather a light yellow cake filled with pastry cream and topped with chocolate glaze. It was invented in Boston, and is apparently the official dessert of Massachusetts, but as Wikipedia helpfully told me, “it is not mass-produced in Boston.” So put the thought of mail-ordering those mass-produced Boston cream pies out of your pretty little head.
Regular Boston cream pie is a little plain for my tastes, so I decided to add a few more flavors and make an Almond Joy version. The cake is based on a wonderfully soft and fluffy almond cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible
Aaaanyhow, Beranbaum’s a genius, love her book, buy it, let’s move on. So the cake is a light, moist almond cake with both almond extract and ground almonds in the batter. The cream center is coconut-flavored, with plenty of shredded coconut in every bite. And the semi-sweet chocolate glaze brings them both together, with a handful of chopped almonds and some shredded coconut on top for good measure.
I made and assembled the whole thing in the course of one afternoon, which is totally do-able work-wise, but might be a little ambitious considering the cooling time some of the components need. Nonetheless, it’s an easy cake to whip up and one that’s totally fancy enough to serve to company or as part of a special occasion! Birthday party cake for an Almond Joy lover, perhaps? The almond and coconut flavors really elevate the cake and make it seem more intricate and involved than it actually is, and the pastry cream in the center keeps the cake moist for days.
I shared it with friends, and after I dropped it off I got a text saying, “What did we DO to deserve this?!” Which admittedly could be read two ways, but they assured me they meant it as a compliment, and said it was one of the best desserts they’ve had in a long time.
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