This rich, delicious chocolate and raspberry truffle pie recipe is perfect for the weather right now, because you don’t have to turn on an oven! Plus it’s a great dessert to take along to a BBQ or block party, it’s so rich and indulgent, a small slice will go a long way! With that in mind, I will be bringing this beauty along to Fiesta Friday this week!
As you probably know, yesterday was Pi Day. I’ll take any excuse to eat pie and it has no calories if I make it myself, right? I went with Banoffee Pie because it’s so yummy and there’s no need to fuss with any pastry if you don’t want to. Banoffee Pie is an English dessert, it’s made from bananas, toffee and fresh whipped cream. Mine also has an oreo crust and shaved chocolate because I’m a firm believer that chocolate makes almost everything better!
In case you hadn’t guessed it yet, it gets its name from smooshing banana and toffee together, like a perfect marriage that rivals even your biggest OTP!
I did make this pie on Pi day, but we had a busy day yesterday and after stuffing our face with these amazing black bean flautas (I know this is a baking blog, but you definitely need to try them they’re so good) it was 11:30pm by the time I finished baking the pie, hence why you’re getting this post a day late!
It’s been a very stressful few days for me. I’m in Atlanta right now and I was supposed to fly home to the UK on Thursday night, but I got to the airport only to be told by the checking in agent that they wouldn’t allow me to fly because my passport had been damaged! And I can tell you this now, it’s a very scary thing to be told you’re being denied permission to fly! It’s going to work out okay, I’m still in the US but I’m taking a trip to the British Embassy on Tuesday to get an emergency travel document so I can fly home without a valid passport on Thursday. It’s going to cost me a small fortune and I’m missing a Fall Out Boy concert, but that’s where pie comes in to make me feel better!
The caramel toffee in a banoffee pie is traditionally made by boiling cans of condensed milk but I have never made it that way, it’s not that hard to do but I’m too impatient to wait the few hours it takes – plus there’s also a danger the can could explode if you don’t keep it fully submerged and that sounds like something that would happen to me! I made my caramel by cooking butter, brown sugar and condensed milk until a caramel formed. I’ll be honest with you, I did over cook mine a little and so I ended up with a very hard caramel, which isn’t necessarily bad it’s just a bit hard to eat in pie form! You want to remove it from the heat once it turns thick and golden.
I used an oreo crust, which I just made by crushing whole oreos and mixing them with melted butter (you can crush them in a food processor or, if your food processor is full of spicy avocado dip like ours was, you can get your happy helper to crush them in a bag like I did, thanks Leah!). Then you press it into your pan and allow to cool and harden. You then pour in the caramel and top with a few banana slices (I like some of the banana to get all set in the set caramel yum) and put in the fridge for at least an hour, until completely cooled. Then top with more sliced bananas, whip up some cream and stir in yet more sliced bananas and spoon it over the pie, then just decorate with shaved chocolate
You can, of course, present this much more neatly. You can pipe on the whipped cream and arrange the bananas on top in pretty patterns instead of stirring them into the cream, but I like it all mixed up in the cream. And honestly, I like the messy rustic look for this pie! You obviously want to keep it chilled, just take it out of the fridge about 15 minutes before you plan to serve it. If you’ve never had banoffee before, trust me you’re gonna love it. There’s something about banana and toffee together that tastes so good, honestly toffee without banana just tastes wrong to me! It’s the perfect end to a very stressful week!
[recipe title=”Banoffee Pie”]
Ingredients
For the base:
For the toffee:
For the topping:
Method
[/recipe]
Happy Hallowe’en everybody! I won’t lie to you, I’m not Hallowe’en’s biggest fan. But I do love pumpkin and spices and pecans and dressing up (I dressed up as a sickly person in her pjs this year). I have never made pumpkin pie before, I’ve never even eaten pumpkin pie before! But I love everything that goes into it so I figured why not be festive! I decided to add a pecan topping because I think I’ve spent too much time in Atlanta). The pie itself turned out great, I mean I’ve never eaten pumpkin pie so maybe I got it completely wrong, but it was scrummy so either way I’m happy. I’m a great lover of autumn spices, I associate them more with Christmas (see below re: lack of autumn holidays here) but I’m a firm believer that you should bake with cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice all year round.
I think this pumpkin pie post needs a little disclaimer before we continue – this pie doesn’t actually contain any pumpkin. I made this with butternut squash. Hallowe’en isn’t that big of a holiday in the UK and we obviously don’t have thanksgiving, with those being the two big pumpkin holidays we don’t have a plethora of choice when it comes to pumpkins. Just before halloween you can buy pumpkins for carving, but I wouldn’t recommend baking with them. But fun fact: a lot of canned pumpkin is actually butternut squash anyway (they use butternut squash as it’s less stringy, sweeter and a better colour) so I’m not really cheating here! Maybe I should have called it Butternut Squash Pie, but that just doesn’t sound as festive!
Paul Hollywood would not be impressed with my soggy bottom (I over greased the pan, oops)
I have another small confession, I made two pies. The first pie I used a ready made pie crust because I didn’t want to bother making my own pastry (did I mention I was a sickly pj lady today?) and I don’t actually own a pie dish. However it was much shallower than I anticipated and all the pumpkin filling spilled out and I was left with an accidental (but tasty) pecan pie. My mum enjoyed the accidental pecan pie so it wasn’t a complete loss!
Who said the pie filling actually has to be in the pie crust anyway???
I couldn’t bear to just leave it at that so I decided to suck it up and make my own pastry (admittedly this decision was after a failed attempt to buy ready made shortcrust at Tesco), after all shortcrust pastry is pretty much the easiest pastry to make. I will include the recipe for that, but don’t feel bad if you use ready made, I would have if I could have. My philosophy is life’s too short to make your own pastry!
I know you’re jealous of my giraffe print knives
Time to get down to business then!
Ingredients
For the Sweet Shortcrust Pastry:
For the Pumpkin Filling:
For the Pecan Topping:
Method
For the pastry:
Line the bottom of an 8inch pie dish (or sandwich cake tin if you’re improvising like me!) with greaseproof paper and very lightly grease sides of dish.
Put the flour and butter into a bowl and rub the butter into flour until you have fine crumb mixture. Stir in the sugar and cinnamon (if using). Mix in the egg and enough milk to form a soft dough. Try not to work the dough too much as you don’t want to melt the butter. Wrap in cling film and place in fridge to chill for at least 15-30 minutes.
Dust work surface with flour and roll out pastry to a 1/2cm thickness. Transfer to pie dish and lightly press into the bottom and into edges. If you tear the pastry, just fix holes with pastry cut offs. Set aside.
Make shift pie dish
For the pie filling:
Preheat oven to 200C/ 400F/ Gas mark 6.
Line a baking tray with foil and light oil. Halve butternut squash length wise and scoop out the seeds and stringy bits and remove stem. Place squash halves cut side down on baking tray and pour 50ml water into tray. Loosely cover with foil and bake in oven for 50 minutes or until flesh is tender.
Remove from oven and leave to cool. Scoop flesh from peel and put into food mixer, blend until you have a smooth puree. Measure out 500g and set aside (if you have any remaining squash, reserve excess for another use like yummy mash potato).
Look at that bright orange, you’d never get that naturally with a pumpkin!
In a large bowl and hand mixer, beat the squash with condensed milk, eggs, sugar, spices and salt. Pour into the unbaked pastry case, leaving a space for the pecan topping.
For the pecan topping:
Combine the golden syrup, sugar, eggs, melted butter and vanilla extract in a bowl and stir in the pecans. Pour on top of pumpkin layer.
Bake in the oven at 200C/400F/Gas 6 for 50 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean.
Leave to cool in dish for 10 minutes and then and turn out onto wire rack, leave to cool completely.
Serve with freshly whipped cream, yum!
I used a number of recipes from the internet to come up with this recipe. Those that I still have the links for are here and here