Today’s assignment with the Heavenly Cake Bakers was the Bostini.  I have been waiting impatiently for this recipe to come up since the first time I thumbed through Rose’s beautiful cookbook.  The picture of a mug full of pastry cream, topped off with a small cake on top and covered in hot fudge indeed looks heavenly.  This recipe is basically a sophisticated variation of Boston Cream Pie, with orange added to the cake for an extra twist.

There are basically three parts to this recipe: First, the Orange Glow Chiffon Cupcake Batter, the Vanilla Bean Pastry Cream Sauce, and finally the Chocolate Butter Glaze.  However, none of these steps takes an extensive amount of work so don’t let that discourage you from attempting this dessert.

The Orange Glow Chiffon Cupcake Batter went together very easily.  This is an oil based cake so once the dry ingredients are mixed, you add oil, egg yolks, orange zest, orange juice and vanilla.  The  batter  thickens up nicely. In a separate bowl, you make a meringue which is then folded into the batter.   The result is a light orange batter which pours easily into the cupcake pan.  The instructions call for a silicone pan but since I don’t have one, I used my aluminum pans and I lined the bottoms with parchment.  The full batter recipe yields 12 cupcakes and so I decided to halve the recipe to end up with 6 cupcakes.  Now I do not understand what happened, but out of my half recipe of batter I actually came out with 12 cupcakes.  This is really weird and I do not understand.  Last week when I made the 8 cup version of angel food cake batter I also ended up with way too much batter and ended up filling a loaf pan with the extra.  Anyway, the cakes baked up nicely.

The next step was the Vanilla Bean Pastry Cream Sauce.  This sauce is supposed to be a cross between pastry cream and creme anglaise.  The first step was quite interesting in that you scrape the vanilla bean seeds into the sugar and salt mixture and mix it up with your fingers which I have never seen done before.  This mixture is heated with heavy cream until it comes to a simmer.  Then there is a quick exchange when you mix  some of the cream into the egg yolks and then put the egg yolk mixture back into the cream.  I didn’t get any pictures of this since it was rather quick moving and I was afraid if I stopped to take pictures Iwould have a curdled mess on my hands.  The sauce is then heated a few minutes longer and it becomes very thick.  After straining the mixture you put it it directly into custard cups and refrigerate.  Now I seemed to have the opposite problem I did with the batter because with the pastry cream I again made a half recipe which should have yielded six servings.  I had 8 oz. cups rather than the 6-7 oz. cups, but I only needed to make 3 Bostinis so I figured I would have plenty left over.  I barely had enough to fill 3 of the glasses and even then I didn’t fill them as full as I wanted to.  I really am not understanding what is happening with these measurements and yields.

The last step couldn’t be easier.  Basically you heat the butter in a saucepan and when it is simmering you add chopped chocolate.  The recipe calls for 62% chocolate.  Normally I use Ghirardelli chocolate but this time I tried Nestle Chocolatier.  The sauce came out shiny and smooth.  My mouth was watering.

To serve the Bostini, you please a cupcake upside down over the custard and then top with fudge glaze.  Since I didn’t have quite enough custard I put an extra layer of cupcake in so that I could still have a nice dome above the glass.  This did make it a little difficult to eat though.  Next time, I think I will actually put that extra layer of cake in the middle of the creme and add a layer of glaze.  That way, it will break up the custard a bit and in my opinion it will be even better.

We were very pleased with the Bostini and look forward to having it again.  It is definitely a showpiece dessert that tastes as great as it looks.

This project was full of frustrations.  Not only did I burn myself on the caramel which resulted in a trip to the ER and blisters on my thumb and index finger, but after all that, the caramel is just too solid to work in the way it indicates it should in this recipe.   In the end though, I think I ended up with a pretty nice dessert.

The first step in this recipe is to make Creme Anglaise.  This sauce went together quite easily and I was actually thinking the cakes were  going to be a breeze to make.  The sauce is made by scalding cream and milk and then pouring it over eggs and sugar with a touch of nutmeg.  Then you pour the sauce over cubed brioche which I had made a few days earlier (see my previous post).  The brioche is refrigerated anywhere from 2 hours to 12 hours.

The next step is making the caramel.  Now I have made caramel quite a few times and I feel pretty comfortable with the process.  However, this caramel seemed to harden up almost immediately.  I put it in the measuring cup and then poured it into my ramekins.  The first four were just fine but by the time I got to 5 and 6, the caramel was solid before it spread out on the bottom of the ramekin.  No problem I thought to myself, I’ll just pop it in the microwave since Rose suggested doing that while still in the measuring cup.  When I took it out of the microwave it was all bubbly and thick but hadn’t spread out.  Now this was the point that I did something very very stupid and I can’t even tell you why.  But I poked my finger into the caramel to spread it out on the bottom of the ramekin and I don’t think I need to say that the caramel was VERY hot!  It’s one thing to accidentally spill hot caramel on you which results in a burn, but I can not believe that I actually put my finger right into the boiling hot caramel.    Well, my baking was done for that night.

So tonight I figured I’d whip this dessert together.  Hubby helped me by coring the pineapple with the corer we bought this summer.  I have to put a plug in for this nifty little gadget since I wasn’t sure it was going to be worth it to buy it.  But we have really used this a lot and it saves so much work when you eat pineapple.   Since I decided to go ahead and core the pineapple first, I had to alter the instructions just a bit.  I made the syrup and then just put the slices in to roast.  I was having trouble with the thermometer in such a small amount of liquid so I just used my own judgment on when it was ready.  My ramekins were the perfect size to put the pineapple rings in and I thought it would be pretty just to leave them whole so that is what I did.

The next step is to drain any creme anglaise not absorbed by the brioche.  Mine didn’t seem to have any extra which may have been due to the fact that it soaked an extra day.  All I know is there wasn’t any leftover to use as garnish.  The soaked brioche is spooned into the ramekins and baked in a water bath.

I baked the cakes for about 35 minutes, when the internal temperature was 160 degrees.  I let them cool about 5 minutes and then unmolded them onto a plate.  The caramel was still hard and was just a disk that was stuck in the bottom of the ramekin.  My caramel must not have been dark enough because it looked anemic when I removed it and put it on top of the pineapple cake.  I was trying to figure out whether to just throw it out altogether when I decided that I could take the torch to the caramel to brown it up a bit.  So that is what we did and tried it with the disk on the top of the pineapple as well as to the side.  Still, the caramel itself really didn’t taste that great and was rock hard.  After eating our little cakes and quite liking the taste of them without the caramel, we had an idea.  Why not forget the caramel altogether and just put a little turbino sugar on top of the pineapple and caramelize the sugar.  So that is what we did and I think out of the three options, the last one is the best.