Omni Parker Hotel Boston Cream Pie

Omni Parker House Boston

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Tips For Making Boston Cream Pie

I will say upfront that this cake will take some time to prepare, as well as some intermediate baking skills but dont let that scare you off. Boston Cream Pie is a dessert that is well worth the effort and if you carefully follow our recipe below youll have a delicious, show-stopper of a dessert to serve your dinner guests.

Here are a few tips & tricks I learned along the way:

• You must use a kitchen scale and weigh the flour and sugar for the cake. Do not try to convert the weight to a measured volume amount the measurements must be precise, and weight measurements are the ONLY way to be exact.
• Use softened butter in the cake, NOT melted butter. This makes an enormous difference.
• The flour and butter need to be folded into the batter and not whisked. To fold, simply take a spatula and gently fold the ingredients over and over until they are mixed.
• DONT use bake-even strips around the edge of the cake pans. The cake batter in this recipe bakes up nice and evenly as is, and the bake-even strips actually prevent the batter from rising properly. So dont use them.

The nice thing about this recipe is that you can tackle it in pieces so it wont feel overwhelming. Make the custard the day before you plan to serve your Boston Cream Pie. Bake the cake layers the day before so they, too, can cool before assembling. Then, assemble your Boston Cream Pie a few hours before you plan to serve it so the ganache can set up before slicing.

Boston Has The Omni Parker House To Thank For Its Beloved Cream Pie

The Boston cream pie is as woven into the fabric of Beantown as the Boston accent. Whats now revered as the state dessert was once merely a simple cake produced at the Parker House.

Bostonians are quick to remark that the Boston cream pie is a charming, storied slice of the citys history. These days, its just as ubiquitous in Beantown as clam chowder, cannoli, baked beans and oysters, and is found in forms that arent merely cake, but shaped into donuts and churned into ice cream.

The Boston cream pie has long been a staple, thanks to the Omni Parker House Hotel and chef Augustine François Anezin. Anezin arrived in Boston from France in the mid-19th century, armed with a Rolodex of French specialties: green turtle soup, roasted beef and fowl speared onto spits and spun over coals, silky mayonnaise and ham sunk in champagne sauce. He transformed the newly opened restaurant into a fine-dining destination, introducing and perfecting a host of dishes in the Parker House kitchen.

It was Anezin and his staff who dreamt up the Boston cream pie, looking at popular American desserts for inspiration, like American pudding-cake pie and Washington pie, cakes that were sliced into two layers and swiped with a filling in between. But one of the biggest differences between the then haute desserts and the Boston cream pie was the introduction of chocolate.

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What Is Boston Cream Pie

Despite the name, its not a pie at all. Filled with a rich and velvety pastry cream, what truly makes this two-layer golden cake so special is the rich chocolate icing. Back in the 1800s, chocolate was mainly consumed at home as a beverage or in puddings. With this inventive use of chocolate, the dessert was originally named Chocolate Cream Pie. Over time, the name changed, and in 1958, the Boston Cream Pie became so popular it was fashioned into a Betty Crocker boxed cake mix recipe.

Its so wicked awesome , were sharing our original recipe so you can learn how to make your own Boston Cream Pie at home. But if baking isnt your thing, you can always order Boston Cream Pie delivery from Goldbelly.

The Original Boston Cream Pie Recipe

• The Original Boston Cream Pie Recipe

The Boston Cream Pie is a timeless, culinary creation dating back to 1856. The dessert was first created and served at the grand opening of Bostons Parker House, now widely known as Omni Parker House, nestled in downtown Boston, MA. Today, the Boston Cream Pie is distinguished as Massachusetts official state dessert over Toll House Cookies and the Fig Newton.

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Boston Cream Pie At Parker House To Go

Does anyone know if we can just get a serving of Boston Cream Pie at the Parker House without having to do the fine-dining in the restaurant? We will only be in Boston for a few days and there are so many food places on our list that we’re trying to avoid having to eat a big meal at Parker House and stuffing ourselves silly. Does just going for dessert look ridiculous? I thought of the Last Hurrah Bar that’s at Parker House but we don’t drink so I was trying to avoid ordering only pie and water there. Such a dilemma. 🙂

The Last Hurrah does serve food and there is no requirement that you consume alcohol there so you do not have to indulge or drink water. Many people look ridiculous in bars and it isn’t usually because of ordering pie. i don’t drink either and have never had a problem in a bar. If all else fails, the Parker House has the recipe on their web site.

Edited: 7 years ago

Thanks for the recipe link. For fun, I’ll try out the recipe after I eat the real one. 🙂

You can have the pie in parkers or the last hurrah, no problem. My wife and I have done that a couple of times on different trips. Nice way to relax for a short time between shopping, sightseeing etc.

Enjoy!!

I went searching because I thought I had read that you could get it to go. I found a few reviews that say the person bought the pie in the gift shop at the Parker House. I may just stop by this weekend and get one. I haven’t had their version in many years.

Penny

Penny

Why Is Boston Cream Pie

In the words of food writer Greg Patent, author of Baking in America, the cream cake was more like a cream puff than a cake . It is also possible that the Boston cream pie name is a reference to the claim by the Parker House Hotel in Boston that its first chef, M., invented the dessert there. Sanzian. Ms.

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Try The Boston Cream Pie

For the price I paid for one night, I was hoping for a big bathroom and a great view of the city. Instead the bathroom was small and the view from our room was of someone’s apartment. The hotel is nice & the bed was super comfy though. Pillows were a little too soft for my liking. I enjoyed being able to check in from home so when I got there my room key was already set aside and I didn’t have to wait for it. The Boston cream pie was delicious & is cheaper if you get it to go from the gift shop then at the restaurant.More

• Trip type: Traveled as a couple
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Thank you for taking the time to comment on your recent stay at the Omni Parker House. It is regretful that you were disappointed with the size of the room as well as with the view. Due to our historic nature we have some rooms which, by today’s standards are small. Also, being located in the heart of a major city, there are buildings surrounding us which limit views for a few of our rooms as well. With that said, we feel our location, history and staff make up for some of the shortcomings of a 155 year old hotel.

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• Trip type: Traveled as a couple
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What Is The Difference Between Bavarian Cream And Boston Cream

The texture of Bavarian cream is more solid, while that of Boston cream is creamy. Heavy cream and whipped cream are used in Bavarian cream. The Boston cream is primarily made with milk and eggs, and it is a custard-like dessert. Bavarian cream is usually made with fruit puree or fruit sauce, and it is a custard-like dessert.

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Eat Cake And Be Married

Today individual sized pies are still served in Parkers Restaurant. The hotel states that it is in this restaurant at the table 40 that John F. Kennedy proposed to Jackie Bouvier. You can request the table for dinner if you are planning a romantic getaway in Boston. The hotel is gorgeous and worth a visit just to marvel at the beautiful architecture. Although, there is also Martins Tavern of Georgetown that claims the proposal happened in their booth 3. Where is the truth?

If you dont have time, drop by a gift shop called Morsels inside the hotel. They have coffee and a variety of desserts, including Boston cream pie. I chose this option since a dinner at Parkers Restaurant costs a pretty penny. I grabbed this baby to go and enjoyed it in a nearby coffee shop. Its a genuinely good cake: moist sponge, not overly sweet cream and delicious chocolate ganache. Almond flakes add a beautiful nutty note to it. A good old classic that you can rely on, but it wont blow your mind away.

I was a bit underwhelmed at the first bite, but after giving it some thought I realized: maybe this pie isnt supposed to blow your mind away? Since when has a piece of good cake stopped being enough? This is the traditional recipe this is how the pie used to be made 160 years ago its delicious. What else can you ask from it? So I say when in Boston, definitely head down to this historic site and have a bite of the legendary dessert!

The Kind Of Pie That Is Actually A Cake

Boston cream pie is a cake made of two layers of sponge, filled with rum infused custard cream and topped with chocolate ganache frosting. Why is it called pie then? As Yankee Magazine points out,

at that time, pie and cake tins were often considered interchangeable, as were the words themselves. This lax approach to labeling is likely why Sanzians French-inspired concoction débuted as Chocolate Cream Pie in 1856, and why subsequent versions continued to be called pies rather than cakes.

But theres still more to its unique history. The use of chocolate icing on top was revolutionary.

When the Parker House opened, chocolate was mainly consumed at home as a beverage or in puddings. So the Parker House cake might have become well known for its rather innovative use of chocolate.

Can you believe that before this timeless dessert was invented the words cake and chocolate didnt belong together? Can you imagine a world without chocolate frosted cake? What a sad world that would be!

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In Literature And Music

For more than 150 years, the Parker House has appeared in prose and poetry set in and around Boston.

Edith Wharton included a private meeting between characters Mr. Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska at the Parker House in her celebrated work of the early 20th century, The Age of Innocence. Archer is told that the Countess Olenska is staying in Boston at the Parker House, and he flees Newport to meet her there.

Quentin Compson treats himself to a meal at Parker’s Restaurant before committing suicide by flinging himself from the Anderson Memorial Bridge into the Charles River in William Faulkner’s 1929 novel “The Sound and the Fury.”

In Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ Willy Loman claims he ‘met a salesman in the Parker House’. One imagines that as today a salesman would meet people in the public areas of such a grand hotel but stay, like Willy, at somewhere like the ‘Standish Arms’.

Although many “haunting” books and “ghost tours” claim that Stephen King‘s 1999 short story 1408about a writer who experiences a haunted stay at a New York hotel called the Dolphinwas based on Room 303 of the Parker House and the supernatural events surrounding the room, King’s personal assistant says that claim is false.

In Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, the characters stayed at the Parker House, mentioning it was where Dickens had stayed. In Anita Diamant’s 2004 novel, The Boston Girl, the main character experiences a bad date at the Parker House.

The Original Boston Cream Pie: History And Recipe

Let me start by saying that I had no idea there is such a thing as the official dessert of the state. Let me also further embarrass myself by saying it took me just a little over a year to try the official dessert of Massachusetts, although I live mere 50 miles away from Boston and have been there multiple times. Boston cream pie was proclaimed the official state dessert in 1996.

You can find Boston cream pie in many bakeries and restaurants around the country, but does it get any better than trying it in the place where it was invented? The pie is a culinary creation of Bostons Parker House, now widely known as Omni Parker House. According to their website,

the recipe was originally called the Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie, and was created and served at Parkers Restaurant from the opening of the hotel in October 1856.

Many reviews online say it is not the best cream pie in Boston and its too expensive at $8.56 a piece. But my first ever Boston cream pie had to be the original one. That would set a bar for all the other versions. That would be my reference in the world of pies that are not really pies, but cakes. For thats what it is.

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