Mom, I’m sooooo bored.
Well, how about we bake something?
You mean Rice Krispies bars?
That’s not baking. How about a piecaken?
Piecaken? Awesome!
If you’ve never heard of piecaken, it’s exactly how it sounds: a pie baked inside a cake. The doubled-up dessert became a hot Thanksgiving trend a few years ago. Because, indulgence.
Consider it the inevitable sweet spawn of a turducken — that mid-’80s invention of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck and then stuffed into a deboned turkey.
Oddly enough, Pinterest pages devoted to piecaken are not this dessert’s best friend. Most photos show slices of cherry pie bleeding into white cake, crumbling messes of apple and chocolate, sagging stacks of berries and frosting. Thick pie crusts within fluffy cakes look like sheets of plywood amid insulation.
Our challenge was to elevate the piecaken to a dessert that nixes the crusts, tastes great and looks fabulous — and is fun! After all, the lure of a piecaken is bringing what looks like an ordinary cake to the table, then serving up slices that provoke only one response: “Whoa, there’s a pie inside this cake!”