BANOFFEE PIE of all things.....

While watching the Olympics, I checked out the Food Channel and Paula Deen was on raving about the pub food she and her husband ate while visiting in England.

Banoffee pie? It looked good. The image actually haunted me for a couple of days. Today after work I stopped in at McKay's and purchased a box of graham crackers and two cans of 14 ounce sweetened condensed milk.




Her recipe called for 1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs. And 10 tbsp of softened butter. Well, the graham cracker box recipe called for 9 crackers equal to 1 and 1/4 cups of graham cracker crumbs.

So I dragged out Mom's food processor, assembled the parts, plugged it in and nuthin'. I tried every switch and position I could think of, I disassembled the food processor and gave brief thought to trying to find a small appliance repair service.

I got out a gallon zip lock bag and gently crushed the graham crackers with my genuine Myrtle wood rolling pin. Crushes nicely.
I then briefly warmed the 8 tbsp (1 cube) of butter for 30 seconds in the microwave and mashed it together with the crumbs and mixed them all together into a pie crust, preset the oven for 350 and cooked the pie crust for 8 minutes after having waited 15 minutes for the oven to warm up.




When the pie crust has cooked, lower the oven to 300 degrees. To create the toffee filling, the sweetened condensed milk must be caramelized (Once you have wrestled the stuff OUT of the cans with a very cranky can opener). Pour the condensed milk into a 9 x 12 x 2 inch glass baking dish. Cover the baking dish with a foil and place the dish inside a larger poaching pan (ban Marie)I used a standard glass pie plate. Add water to a poaching pan until half way up sides of baking dish. I used the roaster, it has a flat bottom and I put hot water halfway up the side of the pie plate. Bake for 1 1/2 hours. What LIE, I baked and baked and baked the thing for nearly four hours. I finally turned off the oven at 10 pm. The milk was not as dark as Paula's but it tasted wonderful, nice and caramelized.



The recipe calls for THREE large bananas. Jeez! One large banana is quite enough, I'm not building Mount Everest here. Slice one banana onto about half of the caramelize milk.



Pour or spoon the rest of the pudding mixture over the bananas.






The recipe calls for 1 and 1/2 cups whipping cream 1/3 cups confectioner's sugar and 1 tsp vanilla. I went straight for the genuine whipped cream in a can and sprayed the rosette looking things and oh, ain't it purty?

One final comment, I am pretty sure the caramelized condensed milk idea came from Mexico as there are a lot of canned milk recipes from there. However it wound up in a pub in England, it is a delicious thing. I need to figure out how to make it in less than six hours for crying out loud.