TWD – Part 2 – Banana Cream Pie!

Banana Cream Pie.  BANANA CREAM PIE.  Just the name sounds wonderful, and I have wanted to make this for more years than I can remember.  This week, thanks to Amy of Sing for Your Supper, I finally made it!  Check out her blog for the recipe.

In the spirit of frugality and in the interest of cleaning out my freezer, I pulled out a blob of dough that represented the remains of several Dorie pie crusts.  Folks, you just CANNOT throw out scraps when they contain so much butter.  Now, re-rolling the crust so many times does make for a tough pastry, but it still tastes oh-so-good.  I couldn’t find my mini-tart pans, so I ended up with something that wouldn’t quite fill a 9-inch pie plate.  In the oven, it flattened out into a pancake.

But I would not be thwarted!  No!  I piled everything on top of said pancake – bananas, pastry cream, bananas, and whipped cream.  The verdict?

Well . . . mixed.  At first, I didn’t like the pastry cream very much.  Why?  I could taste the corn starch.  Blech.  I did like the depth of flavor that the nutmeg and brown sugar added to the dessert, but I really disliked the cinnamon.  After I put the dessert together, everything tasted a lot better – the components work better in concert than individually.

I would make this again, but I’d eliminate the cinnamon and use a whole vanilla bean while boiling the milk to intensify that flavor.  Master Chow felt the same way, and we both agreed that our favorite elements were the bananas, crust, and whipped cream.  To see what other bakers made, check out the  TWD blogroll.  Recipe after the jump.

Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough
Adapted from a recipe by Dorie Greenspan

Makes one generous 9-inch pie crust

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 sticks very cold (frozen is fine) unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon-size pieces
2 1/2 tablespoons very cold cream cheese, cut into 2 pieces
About 1/4 cup ice water

Procedure

Put the flour, sugar and salt in a food processor fitted with a metal blade; pulse just to combine the ingredients. Drop in the butter and cream cheese and pulse only until the butter and shortening are cut into the flour. Don’t overdo the mixing.  Add a little water and pulse once; add some more water and pulse again; and keep going that way. Then use a few long pulses to get the water into the flour. If after a dozen or so pulses, the dough doesn’t look evenly moistened or form soft curds, pulse in as much of the remaining water, or even a few drops more, to get a dough that will stick together when pinched.

Shape the dough into a disk and wrap it. Refrigerate the dough at least 1 hour before rolling. The dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 5 days or frozen for up to 1 month.

Once the dough is fitted into the pie plate, refrigerate it again. Keep the pie plate in the fridge while you preheat the oven.