TWD: Banana Cream Pie

I do not like bananas. I can't think of one other fruit that I don't really like (I've never tried durian though and I have a feeling that I wouldn't like it) but bananas, ugh. I don't like them in bread, in smoothies, in a Jolly Rancher or a Now-n-Later. I don't know if I ever liked them and my sister has as strong dislike of them too so maybe it's genetic? I don't know but I know that I don't like them. They're the world's most popular fruit; people eat twice as many bananas a year as apples and oranges combined. I do not contribute to that statistic. I have to think that part of the really high consumption of bananas is for runners. The first marathon I ever ran it was really hot and around mile 19 I just lost it. I was so hot and I hit the wall. And the nicest lady ever was also having a hard time and she was walking with me and she kept trying to make me eat a banana! And because she was so nice, I didn't want to tell her to please just throw the banana away. Anyway, that's my long-winded description of my dislike of the poor banana. Needless to say, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of banana cream pie. But wait, Dudley loves bananas, he loves pie, I'll just make him a little pie. So that's what I did.

I have to say, even though I wasn't excited about banana cream pie when I saw it as a pick for this month, this pie isn't that bad. This is not to say that I tried it, because I definitely didn't. But, as I was making the pastry cream I realized that I could maybe make another little mini pie for me with pineapple instead of banana, so that's what I did. One banana cream pie, one pineapple cream pie. We return to the beachy desserts for a second week in a row here at TWD. I'm picturing Coppertone, beach towels, and sand pails. It's a good thing.

The pastry cream was super easy to make. I don't know about anyone else but I didn't love pushing my brown sugar through a sieve. I had fresh, soft brown sugar but it still didn't want to go through very well so I ended up just putting it in (after I made sure that there were no pesky little sugar rocks in it). I read on the P&Q that the pastry cream gets lumpy and indeed it does. I've never had that happen to me but I just whisked it vigorously and it was fine, and seriously delicious too. So, pie crust + pastry cream + bananas (or pineapple) + whipped cream topping = banana cream pie. Not too bad. I had a really hard time cutting this pie for pictures because I made it in little pielets. So, there aren't any pictures of a nice slice of pie. I did take a picture of the insides though, in all of their messy, goopy glory.

Pineapple Cream Pie: I just sliced the pineapple pieces super thin and layered them in.

Banana Cream Pie: I think that the bananas are much, much more suited to slices of this pie. They're so much easier to cut!

Verdict: Dudley liked the banana cream pie . . . but I can't trust him because he says that he likes everything that I make. And he hasn't developed a really great vocabulary of descriptive food words. He uses adjectives such as awesome or incredible quite a bit but I'm still working on getting him to make more nuanced descriptions for me. However, he's a fantastic taste-tester and I won't quibble too much on the adjectives. I liked the pineapple version a lot actually. If I made it again I would leave the spices out of the pastry cream and maybe make a coconut pastry cream because I love the whole pineapple-coconut combination these days. It was much harder to cut into but other than that it was yummy! Thanks to Amy of Sing for Your Supper for choosing a recipe that I really would never have picked for myself and that I actually liked in the end.