Birthday Pie's da Bombe*

"A" Pie

Aster is now 6 and Dianthus is now 8 (and this blog is 10 and a half!).  Aster requested a lemon meringue pie for his birthday and Dianthus wanted a version of a charlotte royale after we told him that it was sometimes called "brain cake".

New 6 year old expression?

Rolling his own cake

Extra whipped cream and chocolate served sauce on the side

Baking notes:  The lemon meringue was from Kate McDermott's The Art of Pie using the Magpie pie crust.  I've settled on both as excellent.
The charlotte royale was inspired by the Great British Baking Show (here's Mary Berry's recipe and lots of images).  I had a recipe for "Scarlet Empress" in the charlotte section of the showcase cakes of Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible, which Aster and I started to follow.  However, we did substitute cherry preserves for the raspberry in the exterior jelly roll.  Then we filled it with cherry ice cream instead of making a Bavarian cream.  The chocolate cake (from The Cake Book, my go-to cocoa and hot-water based chocolate cake) was an addition after we realized that there was no way that one recipe of biscuit roulade would be enough for both the side rolls and the base.  This was my first rolled cake, and the very light dry cake (eggs beaten separately, no butter) made for easy rolling (it is included in the cookbook just for that reason) but was not the tastiest cake (unlike the chocolate base, which is).

*This clever title is probably not funny unless you know that 1) a bombe is a term for a molded layered ice cream or cake and ice cream dessert (see Brownie Bombe  and Ina Garten's Ice Cream Bombe) and 2) in the mid 1990s, "da bomb" was used to indicate something great.