Hveiti og Smjör: Week20: Banana Custard Pie with Peanut Butter Icing

Week 20 is bananas! But it was a journey to make it here. The final recipe is a flaky soft crust with peanut bits inside, a banana custard center, and fluffy peanut butter icing on top!

Before the final recipe was chosen, I tried this one. It's a chocolate, banana, and peanut butter frozen pie. It's delicious, but barely firm after freezing over night, so no way I could transport it to 25+ people by bicycle. I'll show you how I made it though!

The crust is the same for both desserts. It was so tasty I kept it for the banana custard pie. It starts with salted roasted peanuts, flour, sugar and a bit of baking powder.

An egg yolk.

Oil, vanilla extract, and lemon juice. Lemon juice (or sometimes a vinegar) are used in pie crusts to keep the gluten chains short, for a flakier crust. If I had left this out, the crust would have been rubbery and hard to cut through easily with a fork.

All the liquid ingredients together for easy pouring.

First I pulse the dry ingredients till the peanuts are well chopped and mixed throughout. If you taste this powder, it's slightly sweet with a nice hint of nut taste.

Pour in the liquid till it all comes together.

Mmmm, look at that beautiful dough and it's light brown color, all from the peanuts.

Rolled out into a disc.

A closeup of the unbaked dough to show the little bits of peanuts.

I baked the extra in pseudo "breadsticks" so I could see the texture and taste before adding the pie filling. See how broken it has a flaky texture? That's from the lemon juice.

Bananas! I haven't made an item with these yet, and their time has finally come. See how they are starting to brown? This means the fruit has started to oxidize. They are softer, and sweeter when brown like this. Perfect for baking, even if the texture is a bit too soft for most people's raw eating pleasure.

Just right. Only a few dark spots, but the fruit is easily mashed.

Add peanut butter.

And coconut milk! I love coconut milk, it's so creamy and tasty. It adds a richness to recipes that milk cannot.

Bananas, peanut butter, coconut milk, a bit of cocoa powder, and vanilla extract. That's it! This is pureed till ultra smooth with no lumps from the bananas, and poured into the pie crust, and needs freezing for at least 3 hours.

It was tasty, and I was able to slice it, but you can see from this photo, that even straight out of the freezer it's a bit soft. So, on to the next recipe. I knew I wanted to keep the crust, and the bananas, and the coconut milk. Most people would immediately jump to a banana cream pie, but those are also needing to be cold to set, and I wanted something baked. A baked banana pie! Yes!

I needed more bananas.

These were soft enough I didn't even need to tear them into chunks. I just started the mixer for a minute and got a nice banana pure.

Add coconut flakes.

Add some brown sugar and flour.

Mmmm, coconut milk. I normally don't include packaging in the shots, but I loved the drip and the easy to read label with no distracting brand or logo.

Here is the custard batter before baking. Bananas, coconut flakes, brown sugar, melted butter, vanilla extract, and coconut milk. Yummy!

Another peanut crust.

Mmmm, look at those golden edges.

A little under an hour later, out comes a beautiful light gold pie.

Next the icing. This is just room temperature butter and peanut butter, whipped for several minutes till the color starts to lighten and it is well incorporated. You can see the darker brown of the plain peanut butter still stuck to the walls.