Week 30 – Banoffee Pie

This weekend I went to the place that is my ultimate baking inspiration, the most civilised, elegant place in the world to go for tea and cake, Betty’s Tea Room! I grew up in Yorkshire and on Saturday I took a flying visit back down to Harrogate to see two old school friends Alex and Julia. Alex is getting married in 6 weeks' time so I wanted to take her out for a special pre-wedding treat and Julia has just completed the most ridiculous cycling challenge, the Tour De Force for an amazing cause, DBMT (you can read more about her adventure and still have the chance to donate http://www.bmycharity.com/juliakeenlyside), so these girls deserved the best cakes in town!

Exquisite!

Betty’s is an oldie woldie tea room which offers every baked good you could imagine, in beautiful surroundings, with old fashioned service. As the girls and I had a long overdue catch up we tucked in to finger sandwiches, scones with jam and clotted cream and exquisite, delicate pastries and cakes. Looking at the beautiful raspberry tart made me think that it was about time I tried out my newly purchased pie tin and made a pie or tart.

I really would like to have braved it and made pastry from scratch this week, but with having to travel back from Yorkshire and then going to a 3 hour choir rehearsal on Sunday morning time didn’t really allow me to be too adventurous - maybe next week. So instead I opted to make a Banoffee Pie, which was more of an assembly job rather than a bake, but it turned out well in the end. The recipe came from the ever-reliable BBC Good Food, here’s the link:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/8183/banoffee-pie

Ingredients

• 300g oaty biscuits (Hob Nobs are good)
• 60g butter, melted
• 397g tin Nestlé Carnation Caramel
• 3 large bananas, sliced
• 350ml double cream
• 1 tbsp icing sugar
• 100g dark chocolate (I am not a huge dark chocolate fan so I used Cadbury’s milk chocolate flakes instead, which meant I could just crumble it over the pie instead of having to melt it)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4. Crush the biscuits in a food processor then add the melted butter and pulse to combine. I don’t have a food processor much to the amazement of many of my friends after so many weeks of baking!!  Anyway, I just put the biscuits in a sandwich bag, wrapped a tea towel around the bag and bashed it with a rolling pin until the biscuits were crushed into small pieces. Then I just poured it all into a bowl and mixed in the butter. A few people commented on the recipe’s webpage that the base was too crumbly, so I put in more butter than the recipe suggested: probably about 100grams rather than 60. Press the mixture into a 24cm tart tin, with a removable base, in an even layer. Transfer the tin to a baking sheet and cook for 10-12 minutes, until lightly toasted and set. Leave to cool then gently release from the tin and put on a serving plate.
   
   
2. Spread the caramel over the biscuit base and chill for 1 hour. Arrange the banana slices over the toffee. Whip the cream and sugar together to form soft peaks (I got a bit carried away and over whipped my cream, I was trying to make a cup of tea at the same time as using my electric hand whisk which probably wasn’t wise...anyway, it just meant the cream was a bit tricky to spread and was a bit flatter than planned!) and spread over the bananas. Melt the chocolate in a microwave or in a bowl set over, not in, a pan of simmering water. Allow to cool slightly, before drizzling over the cream. As I said in the ingredients list I prefer milk chocolate so I bought Cadbury’s flakes and just crumbled them over instead of melting dark chocolate. More importantly this saved me having another bowl to wash up which is critical because I don’t have a dishwasher so every little helps!!

Mmmm...

Overall the pie was very tasty but very sweet so I would suggest serving a small slice at a time. It did get the thumbs up and the ‘amazeballs’ rating from my husband Dave so that’s got to be good I guess! I think this would be a great bake to make if you have people coming for dinner or are going round to eat with friends because it’s super easy but looks quite impressive and serves loads of people.

See you next week, happy baking!

Xx Linds xx