Cherpeaple

 Do you know about the Turducken? Wikipedia describes it as a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which is in turn stuffed into a de-boned turkey. I'm not really sure what the point of that would be, I mean it's poultry stuffed poultry stuffed inside of poultry. Perhaps I've been following the Weight Watchers program so long that the idea of eating poultry doesn't sound overly exciting to me. And I suppose I could use the same argument for why the dessert version of the Turducken called the Cherpumple DID sound so exciting to me. 

Mr. ShowMe actually found it on the web back before Thanksgiving. (I usually steer clear of articles and posts on the web for food items, as they just make me hungry and almost NEVER for carrots, spinach, or brocoli!) I can't take any credit for creating this monster. Charles Phoenix is responsible for that. He describes the Cherpumple as a three-layer cake with a pie stuffed in each layer. 

To say he inspired us would be an understatement. We decided it would be a fun project for us to try at Christmas. We read through many of the successes and failures posted at his web site, watched his video carefully, gathered the ingredients and started the project wondering if we could actually pull it off. Mr. ShowMe doesn't like pumpkin pie, so we used peach in place of pumpkin, hence the name change for our version to Cherpeaple.

We decided that our cake pans weren't big enough so we purchased a spring form pan. We baked the pies two days before Christmas and on Christmas eve started in on the cakes. We baked them one at a time, and found that low temps and long times was the secret to getting them done. We actually baked each of the layers about an hour at about 275. We fiddled with the oven temp as they baked, if they seemed to be getting too "done" on the edges and still not "done" in the middle we turned it down. Eventually we had the three layers completed and decided to try to assemble the monster and transport it for an hour and half in the car was just asking for trouble, so we took it un-assembled to Mr. ShowMe's parents house on Christmas morning.

I cheated and used canned frosting.

It was a big hit!

I don't know if we'll ever make another one, but I'm glad we did it once. It was fun! 
Did you make any extravagant dishes over Christmas?

I'd love to hear about them, if you did.

Thanks for stopping by :)