National Boston Cream Pie Day serves up a delicious dessert on October 23rd each year. Pie lovers, move along. Cake lovers, pull up a chair. Let’s celebrate the cake with an identity crisis! Boston Cream Pie is a chocolate frosted, custard-filled cake that is loved by millions.
- In 1856, at Boston’s Parker House Hotel, French chef Monsieur Augustine Francois Anezin created this pudding and cake combination.
- Originally this American-French Chef called the cake the “Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie” and had taken the French Butter sponge cake and filled it with a delightful Crème pâtissière, an egg-thickened custard with a history going back at least as far as Ancient Rome, brushed it with rum syrup and topped with a chocolate fondant.
- In 1996, Massachusetts declared the Boston Cream Pie as their official dessert.
- A civics class from Norton High School sponsored the bill. The pie beat out other candidates, including the toll house cookie and Indian pudding.
- Although it is called a Boston cream pie, it is in fact a cake, and not a pie.
- A Boston cream doughnut is a name for a Berliner filled with vanilla custard or crème pâtissière and topped with icing made from chocolate
- The Boston cream doughnut was designated the official doughnut of Massachusetts in 2003.
- The world’s largest Boston Cream Pie was created in 2010 by culinary students at Southern New Hampshire University. The pastry measured 10 ft wide 1½ ft high and weighted over 1 ton.
- The dessert acquired its name when cakes and pies were cooked in the same pans, and the words were used interchangeably.
- A direct descendant of earlier cakes known as American pudding-cake pie and Washington pie, the dessert was referred to as chocolate cream pie, Parker House chocolate cream pie, and finally Boston cream pie on Parker House’s menus.
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