AND WE'RE BACK!
Hello,
Friends!
I know it is
has been waaaaaay too long. What with
not having a huge group of people to bake for every week, losing my camera, and
just the general hubbub of life, I was able to continue baking sporadically,
but unfortunately, not blogging.
However, with
a new year comes new resolutions, and blogging is one of them. It actually ties
in with my others resolutions which are: “no more buying baking books until I
have made every single recipe I have dog-eared, booked marked or stuck with a
post-it.” For those of you who don’t know me personally, I generally bookmark,
dog-ear, or post-it at least 75% of every recipe in a book I come across. This
means, I have quite a task ahead of me, but I cannot wait to start! And my
third resolution is this: if you crave it, you have to bake it. Meaning, I
don’t want to buy processed desserts anymore. I don’t want to eat day-old
supermarket cake anymore. I want to look at everything I crave not as
temptation, but inspiration. And so, we begin our sugar-filled journey into
2013…
I decided to
begin this year with a dessert I have been craving, but have actually never
tasted. This dessert being, coconut cream pie. For some reason I am totally
drawn to this treat, marking every single version of it in my books, but I’ve
never had it. I’ve also never had banana cream pie, so to kill two birds with
one stone, I decided to adapt a recipe from Cheryl and Grifftih Day of the Back
in the Day Bakery, so it could accommodate both. And so I bring you…
COCO-NANA PIE
WITH HOMEMADE WHIPPED CREAM AND A NILLA WAFER CRUST!
Quick note: I
use a hand mixer in my baking, but this does not mean you can’t use a stand
mixer with different attachments to get your treats ready! I mean, before I had
a hand-mixer I was the world’s hardest whisker, and everything turned out just
fine.
INGREDIENTS:
CRUST:
3 ½ cups
Nilla Wafers (crushed to bits!)
2 Tbsp
All-Purpose Flour
2 Tbsp Sugar
Pinch of salt
(preferably fine)
8 Tbsp/1
stick of unsalted butter at room temperature (so that when you’re mixing it all
together you don’t have to deal with all the hard butter pieces)
Okay, so,
make the crust first so that it can totally cool down before you pour in the
filling.
Start by
placing a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat it to 350 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Then it’s
time to make the cookie crumbs! Now, there are a few ways to do this, but even
now that I have a fancy-schmancy food processor, I still get more excited
pounding away at a Ziploc bag full of cookies with a bottle of wine. Seriously.
Roll the wine bottle over the cookies and watch ‘em crumble. You can also use a
rolling pin, which I assume is slightly less dangerous since you do have to put
some pressure on those Nilla wafers, and a rolling pin is not glass or liquid
filled.
Then, pour the
crumbs into a bowl along with the flour, sugar, salt and butter, and mix it
together with a hand mixer on low speed for around 3 to 5 minutes.
Once that’s
all finished, put the crumb mixture into a 9-inch pie plate, and using your
hands, push the dough evenly onto the bottom and sides of the plate.
Bake for
around 8 minutes until the color has turned to a golden brown and your kitchen
smells so good that you just want to climb into your oven. In a good way.
Once the pie
plate has come out of the oven, place it on a cooling rack and let it stay
there while you put together the rest of the dessert.
FILLING:
6 Tbsp Sugar
2 pinches of
salt
2 Tbsp
cornstarch
5 large egg
yolks
2 cups
half-and-half
2 ½ Tbsp
unsalted butter at room temperature
1 teaspoon
vanilla extract
1 ¾ cup
sweetened coconut
2 ripe
bananas
So, here it
can get a little tricky, but I promise you that it’s worth it. Unfortunately, I
couldn’t get many pictures because I had to use both my hands to keep baking,
but I’ll try to describe it the best way I can.
Start by
whisking together the sugar, salt, cornstarch and egg yolks until they’re
totally blended. (It’s helpful to beat the egg yolks first so that they are
poured into the sugar mixture as one single glob-thing)
Leave the egg
mixture to the side and move over to the stove, where you’ll set your 2 cups of
half-and-half over medium heat in a saucepan until they’re just about to boil.
Then, and this is important, whisk around 1 cup of the half-and-half into the
egg and sugar bowl. I say this, because the half-and-half will be hot and you
don’t want the egg yolks to curdle, so by adding a little at first, it helps
temper the eggs. Then, pour the rest of the half-and-half into the egg mixture
at a steady pace, whisking as you go.
After all the
ingredients are thoroughly whisked, pour the mixture back into the saucepan and
put it over medium heat and whisk it CONSTANTLY for around 7 minutes. Don’t
stop once the mixture just starts to thicken, keep whisking as the it turns to
a pudding-like consistency.
Now, I have
to be honest here, at this point in the baking I started to get a little
discouraged. Mostly because the pudding-like mixture? Smells like egg dip, and
it was making me think this had been a bad idea. If this feeling bubbles up in you,
IGNORE IT! You’re on the right track and this egg dippy thing is gonna make a
dessert you may actually end up calling your favorite thing ever.
Once those 7
minutes are up, take the saucepan off the heat and pour the mixture into a bowl
(if you use the same bowl you whisked the mixture in earlier, make sure it’s
clean from all the uncooked eggs, cornstarch remnants, etc) Give it a couple of
minutes to cool down. Then, whisk in 1 cup of coconut, the vanilla extract and
the butter. The butter will melt due to the mixture’s warmth, but having it
room temperature makes that process much easier.
So, now it
seems like you’re almost there, but unfortunately, with great dessert comes
great responsibility, and this one is necessary, but totally annoying. And that
is placing plastic wrap directly over
the filling so that as it cools down, a skin doesn’t form on top of it. And if
the image of skin on top of your dessert isn’t enough to make you play by the
rules, I don’t know what is.
Anyway,
plastic wrap, cling wrap, etc, they all suck to work with. So I ended up just
ripping pieces off and sticking them directly onto my custard filling and then
placing another piece of plastic wrap to tightly cover the rim of the bowl
(can’t be too careful where skin in concerned)
Then, place
the bowl into the fridge for 30 minutes.
During at
least 15 of these minutes you can do quite a few things. If you’re like me, you
watched Season 2 of Portlandia on Netflix while washing the dishes. Or maybe
you can spend it trying to get your kittens to like you again since they’re
being very cold after you kicked them out of the kitchen so many times because
whenever they’re in there while you’re baking, you always end up finding one of
them trying to put their paws into a liquid-filled bowl, which is gross. Either
option is fine. Or create your own!
But, during
the last 15 minutes of this time, you can be finishing your filling and
whipping up a batch of whipped cream to top it all off!
Whipped cream
is actually insanely easy. Start with 2 cups of heavy whipping cream, and mix
it using a hand mixer until it starts to thicken. Then add ¼ of a cup of
confectioner’s sugar (also known as icing sugar or powdered sugar) and keep
beating it until it starts to get that signature whipped cream consistency.
Don’t get discouraged if it takes some time, it will, but soon you’ll start to
see the mixture holding soft peaks when you remove the mixer, and that lets you
know, you’re done!
You should
also cut up the 2 ripe bananas into tiny slices. Or not. Either way is fine.
But I thought they were a seriously awesome addition.
Now that you
have all the pieces made, you can take the filling out of the fridge, take off
the plastic wrap and gently fold in the banana slices. From there, pour, or to
be more specific, dump the filling into the piecrust and use a spatula to
smooth it out evenly. From there, you can either use a spatula and just put all
the whipped cream on it in one, even layer, or, you can use a Ziploc bag with a
piping tip (or even just a Ziploc bag with a corner cut off) fill it with extra
whipped cream, and pipe a little design around the edges. Sprinkle the top with
the remaining sweetened coconut, and voila! Pie!
CUT TO AFTER
EATING
So, maybe
it’s because I’ve never had coconut or banana cream pie so I have nothing to
compare it to, but this dessert was amazing.
The slices
came out evenly, and the sweetness of the whipped cream blended perfectly with
the coconut cream and the chewy banana slices, popping up in the middle of the
pudding-like filling, so good! Also! The crust was still warm, and the Nilla
wafers provided such a good base, adding a taste that made you feel nostalgic
for being a little kid and enjoying the simplest sort of sweets. I enjoyed my
slice alone at my kitchen table, grateful for the silence and peace in the
apartment and outside, which allowed me to totally go wherever the dessert took
me.
I know, I
know, that must sound totally dramatic, but I swear, it’s not. There’s
something that brings up memories of childhood when you eat this pie. Even not having
had it before, it made me feel more at home. I think the feeling is akin to
meeting someone for the first time and proclaiming that it seems as if you’ve
known each other your whole life.
The past few
months have been absolutely insane, but through all of the things I had to do,
it was writing here that I missed most. Somehow, time seems to stop a little
when you bake. For all the insanity that goes on, it’s nice to get back to
doing something that keeps you from jumping off the deep end.
So, I think
that this choice was a successful first-time back. Because no one knows what
events 2013 holds in store, except for more CocoNana Pie!
Til next
time!
D
PS. I forgot to mention that they’re might be some extra whipped cream left after you’ve topped the filling. I think I forgot that because while most people would look for a place to store the excess topping, I ate it with a large soup spoon and called it a day.
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