Thnx Pinterest

I’m excited to have the first thnxpinterest.com guest blogger, my great friend Raphael!  He is hilarious and a man of many talents including being an amazing cook (he introduced me to my favorite cook book, Mad Hungry).  Raph recently joined Pinterest and was inspired to test out a new recipe.  Hopefully he will start his own foodie blog soon, but until then check out his gorgeous Banoffee pie!

Inspiration

Complete recipe can be found here.

Loved

• No baking! This is by far the easiest pie you’ll make, thanks to the no-bake graham cracker base. You can of course go the traditional route and make your own base.
• Dulce de leche in no time. Typically, you’ll need a toffee made out of condensed milk that’s been boiled for over three hours to give you richness and depth. That exercise often leads to accidents (the cans could explode, that does not sound fun!) and a lot of time watching over it. This toffee was done around 20 minutes.
• Another use for bananas! I used to say, when God gives you overripe bananas, make banana cake. This recipe is another way to morph bananas in to a beautiful dessert.

Learned

• Mise en place. Always. This applies to any sort of cooking, even with a simple no-bake dish, I organized all the components before starting, since there are only three steps (crust, toffee, assembly) – it was easier to group ingredients this way. A little time spent on organizing yourself at the start gets you a lot of time back (applies especially if you’re making this dessert to end a meal with friends).

• The best tools in the kitchen are your hands. When I was making the graham cracker base, I found that evening it out on a loose-bottomed cake tin was best done by clean hands.
• Don’t always follow the recipe. It’s a surprise to me that I never tried this at home when I have eaten many banoffee pies that I care to mention, each one with a different twist. The recipe called for folding half the bananas in the whipped cream then using the other half as topping. Instead I created a layer of bananas before topping with cream. Another twist is to use Oreos to give you a different base.
• Chocolate makes everything better. Since the dessert would have a lot of sweet elements already, I worried about using a rich milk chocolate as topping, so I opted for dark. The problem with really dark chocolate is that you cannot take a vegetable peeler and create little chocolate strips, instead the chocolate crumbled. Either way, the bitter dark chocolate created a different layer of flavor especially since that dulce de leche can be really overpowering.
• Plate. Sometimes a pie is just a pie, but knowing I’ll be making this for a dinner party soon, I wanted to see how well it would, as Top Chef’s say “plate”. This gives you a visual of how to present your desserts. I treated myself to a couple of cake platters from Bountiful in Venice Beach, CA. The one shown is a 9″ platter made of Vaseline.   There is also a very similar one available online at Shop Sweet Lulu.

Thnx

• Thanks Raph!  I really appreciate your willingness to be my first guest blogger and I hope you will do another post soon!
• Thanks Pinterest for all the inspiring ideas. Not on Pinterest? Send me an e-mail thnxpinterest@hotmail.com and I’ll send you an invite (if you sign up for an invite on the site it will take a while).

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Yumm!