In my last post I talked about coming up with Thanksgiving recipe ideas and how there are so many yummy dessert recipes out there and so I didn’t need to come up with my own. Well, need and want are very different things – we may not need another Thanksgiving dessert recipe idea, but I wanted one!
Sweet potato is one of my all time favourite foods, I’ve yet to find a way I don’t like to eat it! But I’d never eaten sweet potato pie before, so naturally I decided I needed to make it! I somehow don’t own a pie plate, I don’t know how this happened but here we are – the need to make a pie but no pie dish to make it in. But who says pie needs to be round anyway? These sweet potato pie bars are the perfect solution to the lack of pie dish conundrum – and I would totally make it this way again even after I’ve acquired my own pie dish. There’s just something about slicing it up into little bars that makes it so much more appealing to me – maybe it’s because I could add a streusel topping and a marshmallow glaze without ruining the clean look of a pie! Making them in bars is a great way to serve them up for Thanksgiving too – no fiddly too thin pieces to make sure everybody gets a piece, a fork isn’t even needed if you want to mingle around the the table. I definitely think they have a more rustic, family feel to them, don’t you?
Since I’d never even eaten sweet potato pie before, I decided to start from an established recipe. I chose this one by Joy the Baker because I love her recipes and the ingredients list on this had me drooling! I thought to myself – I can make her one and then make any changes to suit my tastes. Silly me, I should have known I wouldn’t want to change anything about one of her recipes. I used her crust recipe and filling recipe, then just made it in bar form and added a streusel and glaze. I thought about topping this pie with a lattice crust, but my weakness for streusel beat that idea out. And I’m glad it did, it gives an extra yummy layer of texture, and is a great vehicle for the marshmallow glaze. Marshmallow is a go to pairing with sweet potato dishes and there’s a good reason for that, it just plain works! it’s simple to put together too, it’s just butter, marshmallows and sugar. I melted marshmallows to add to the mix, but in a pinch marshmallow fluff would probably do the trick too. It’s a nice, thick glaze too so it holds its own against the streusel!
Coriander isn’t something I would have thought to put in myself, but it really does make this pie shine! You’ll want to buy coriander seeds and grind them yourself too, coriander is one of those spices that tends to lose it’s flavour quickly once ground. There’s a lot of yummy, warming spices in this pie of course – as well as the coriander we have nutmeg and cinnamon. You cook the filling through before adding it to the pie, so you awaken all those delicious spices that bring so much fall flavour. It’s a good idea to blend the filling first too to make sure the whole thing is smooth, I used an immersion stick blender but you could add it to your blender and give it a whirl too.
There’s a fair bit of work in putting this pie together, with cooking the potatoes, cooking the filling, making the crust, making the streusel and the glaze. But it really isn’t very daunting, you can do stages simultaneously and each part is pretty easy. In bar form as well it’s very forgiving – you don’t have to worry about the top of your pie or breaking the crust!
I hope you give this one a go, it’s a great recipe (with most of it coming from Joy the Baker, you can trust me on that) and your family will love it!
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