Episodes From My Real Life: A Sweet Fix

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

A Sweet Fix

A couple of years ago, or maybe it was just last year, not really sure on that, I copied down a recipe for Cream Horns from my grandmother's favorite cookbook. This was one of those old school cookbooks that women would get for a wedding gift so they could be the best possible housewife. You know, the kind that tells you how to make such delicacies as head cheese and porcupine stew. The cream horn recipe looked reasonable, so I copied it down. And then decided I couldn't be bothered to actually make the cream horns. Well, until Monday. At 5 pm. When I was supposed to be cooking dinner. Oops.

FYI: they're not really that hard. I whipped up a batch of "filling" in my double boiler in about 15 minutes, had the puff pastry dough done fifteen minutes after that and thought I'd have those bad boys done in no time. Until I looked at my "filling." Apparently, 60 years ago when this book was published, cream horns did not contain fluffy sweet whipped filling. They contained pudding. Which is what was sitting in my refrigerator. Since my husband does not like pudding, I had a problem. After a bit of searching I found an easy whoopie pie filling recipe, whipped that up, and stuffed it in my cream horns. For a first go at it, they came out pretty damn good. The filling was a little sweet, and the pastry a little too thick, but perfectly edible. Perfectly....

So, what do you do with a bowl of homemade pudding in your refrigerator? Duh. You make a homemade Boston Cream Pie. Yesterday afternoon I found a really easy recipe for Boston Cream Pie, threw together the cake (literally, I just dumped the ingredients in my mixer, turned it on high and voila! cake mix) cut it in half, filled it with my delicious homemade pudding, whipped up a chocolate ganache and Tah-Dah Boston Cream Pie! (Ok, I goofed the ganache a bit and it was a little runny, but seriously, it's liquid chocolate, it tastes delicious anyway.)