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Sumpthin' in a Sumpthin' Thanksgiving With COVID and all, we were having a small Thanksgiving, and I wanted to do something special. I came up with "Sumpthin' in a Sumpthin'" for Thanksgiving. I was responsible for the main course and dessert. The main course was a CorHen-Kin, a Cornish Game Hen inside a chicken) and dessert was a PieCakein, a Marionberry pie baked inside a cake.
This is the finished pie layer. Not too shabby.
And here's the finished piecaken. Tasty stuff. The CorHenKin is, of course, based on a TurDucKin (chicken in a duck inside a turkey.) We didn't need that much meat, so it's just a Cornish Game hen and your regular chicken.
That pile of meat is the deboned birds, draining after they have brined overnight. Deboning birds is really easy and only takes a few minutes. (Yes, there is a bone in the upper left. That's a wing bone with the flesh pulled down to one end. It's called a "lollipop.")
Lay the chicken out, skin down, and put on a layer of stuffing. This is just onions, mushrooms, and spinach, sautéd in garlic and butter.
Lay the hen on top (shown here without the layer of stuffing.) Now comes the fun part, trying to gather it all up into a ball.
Toothpicks to "stitch" the skin together and twine to hold the toothpicks in place. You end up with a football sized lump of flesh.
Couple hours at 350° (until it reads 165°) and there you go. We rounded out the meal with a salad with stuffed pimentos and stuffed potatoes. Heck of a meal. |
Let's
start with the piecakein. Step one is to bake a pie. It can be any
pie, but I like to use Marionberry. Once you bake the pie, you have
to figure out how to bake it inside a cake. Through experimentation,
I use a springform for the cake. I bake two layers, one to hold
the pie and the other because . . . I like 2-layer cakes.
