selling silly putty door-to-door

Oh esteemed flist! I face a dilemma! I want to make a sweet potato pie. I've never made one before! I got a recipe online which calls for boiling whole potatoes. Another suggests I boil cut-up potatoes, and my mother says not to boil them at all but to bake them, as boiling increases water content. I would default to my mom's advice but I don't recall her ever making sweet potato pie.

So. To boil or not to boil? That is the question.

Other online recipes confuse the matter further by simply calling for "cooked, mashed sweet potatoes" with no clue as to how to get them that way. This is made even worse by the endless variation of ingredients including a simple pecan topping, yogurt, and I kid you not!, tomato soup!