The Wednesday before Thanksgiving has always been Pie Day in our household. On Pie Day we bake… PIES! Each kid gets to pick a pie. Any pie. The catch is, they must help bake “their” pie. Obviously when all six kids are home this results in an amazing amount of pies. Fortunately, five-out-of-six are boys. Pies have never gone to waste.
This year there’s only the three kids. Three pies are never enough (we always have guests) so Dave & I pick pies too. Pie Day continues to be a full day spent mixing, kneading & baking. My kitchen smells amazing!
Regardless of the pies every kid picks, I always make a Banoffee Pie, an English Banana Toffee pie. Way back when we still lived in Minnesota one of the kids (I think Christian, but I’m not sure) found the Banoffee recipe online. I’m not sure it’s this one on Allrecipes.com, but it’s super close (I don’t add the ginger). The fun part was boiling an unopened can of condensed milk for 3 hours! You should have seen my dad’s face when he walked in! He almost exploded worrying about my about-to-explode cans on the stove.
Of course there’s a danger for exploding cans if you boil unopened cans! The trick is to keep them covered with water at all times. It’s a tricky trick. It’s also tricky to see when exactly the “toffee” or caramel, dulche leche, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, is the perfect consistency. This year I found a new trick! Go google!
I opened the cans, then divided two cans of sweetened condensed milk between 3 small canning jars. I screwed the lids on tight and put them in my crockpot, still covered with water, on high for about 4 hours. Now I have not only the perfect consistency, but a little extra caramel sauce for vanilla ice cream. It’s a fabulous, quick, easy way to make our favorite pie filling.
Pie Day with Tess 2014
The easy road to Banoffee!
Great trick with the condensed milk. You are sooo creative and I reckon that pie will be gone in a flash.