Oh My, It's Pie!

Everyone loves pie, or at least they should. Pie is one of the most versatile things around. Pies can be filled with almost anything, and be served as the main dish or as a desert. Germans believe that pie is appropriate for any time of the day, and I agree (although it helps that I'm part German I suppose.) I had an 8 AM staff meeting the other day and brought in pie, and it was enjoyed by all. Today I made a delicious English pie called Banoffee Pie--that's Banana+Toffee, aren't the English so clever? Keira Knightly talks about it in Love Actually, one of my all-time favorite movies, and when I was in London over spring break, I knew I had to try it. I ended up getting it at a pub in Stratford-Upon-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace for those of you that don't know) called the Dirty Duck. If you are ever in Stratford, GO THERE! It's delicious, and quite near the church where Shakespeare is allegedly buried, although for those of us who were in Dr. Wentz's AP English class, we know that no one actually knows where his bones truly lie. OMGPIERCINGTHEVEIL. Haha. Anyway, it was there that I tried Banoffee pie, and vowed that I would learn to make it. I scoured the internet for recipes, and eventually decided on a combination of two: Danny Boome's recipe, available here, and a recipe from epicurious, located here. The reason I decided to be difficult and use two recipes is that the review on Danny's recipe said the toffee was too hard, and the epicurious didn't show how to make a crust. Here is the recipe I used:
Banoffee Pie:

• 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 cups crushed graham crackers, about 11 crackers
• 1 stick butter (1/2 cup), melted
• 2 large ripe bananas
• 1.5 cups heavy cream
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon hot chocolate powder

Directions

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 425°F.

Pour condensed milk into pie plate and stir in a generous pinch of salt. Cover pie plate with foil and crimp foil tightly around rim. Put in a roasting pan, then add enough boiling-hot water to reach halfway up side of pie plate, making sure that foil is above water. Bake, refilling pan to halfway with water about every 40 minutes, until milk is thick and a deep golden caramel color, about 2 hours. Remove pie plate from water bath and transfer toffee to a bowl, then chill toffee, uncovered, until it is cold, about 1 hour.

Add the crushed crackers to a food processor. Pour in the melted butter and pulse until it sticks together and the graham crackers get pulverized. Pour the graham cracker mixture into a 9-inch spring form pan and press with your hands or a 1 cup measurer to evenly distribute on the bottom of the pan. Chill to set for about 15 minutes in the refrigerator.

Pour the dulce de leche over the graham cracker base. Spread evenly. Slice the peeled bananas and arrange over the top covering the entire surface. Whip the cream until firm and spread over the top. Sprinkle top with cinnamon and grated chocolate. Serve.

The toffee part is definitely the easiest part about making the pie, although you really do need to remember to keep a vigilant eye on the water level in the pan, sometimes it goes down too low before the 40 minutes are up. This is what the toffee looked like when I pulled it out:
I know, it looks a little weird, but it get's weirder. I stirred it to spread the heat around and get everything to an even brown color and it looked like this:
Told you it got weirder! But no worries, the lumps settle when you put it in the fridge for an hour.
Now the graham cracker crust can be pretty annoying if you are like me and don't have a food processor. First I had to crush the crackers with a porcelain bowl thing, added the butter and mixed it and crushed it with a hand mixer.


















So after lots of mixing I put it in the pie crust and it looked like this:
After that chilled I filled it with the toffee and the bananas:

Then came the hard part: whipping the cream. The key to whipping cream is to just keep going. It will feel like nothing's happening and your arm is going to kill, or at least mine always does, but that could also be because I have zero upper body strength. In any event, you have to continue whipping until it looks like this:
Then I spread it on the pie and added the cinnamon and chocolate:
Yay pie! I know this isn't a main food item, but I couldn't resist!