I rarely make pies. One big reason is that I give away almost everything I bake (in the pre-pandemic days my primary distribution outlet was my office), and pie is so difficult to share. It requires forks and plates, and the filling will often start falling out once you slice it. I like everything to look nice and tidy when I serve it, and even if I'm serving pie to guests in my own home, the slices often end up quite messy and misshapen. Sarah Kieffer's Banana Cream Pie Bars from 100 Cookies promise to deliver the satisfaction of a pie in a neat, easy-to-share form.
I ran into some trouble early on with the crust. You make it in the mixer by putting flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl; mixing in cubed chilled butter until the butter starts to break down; adding more cubed chilled butter and mixing until the butter is in various-sized chunks; and adding ice water and mixing until the dough comes together. You gather the dough into a square and fold it over onto itself until it comes together. The dough was quite sticky and I rolled it into a 9-inch by 13-inch pan rectangle on a piece of parchment paper that I had already folded to fit inside a pan. I put another sheet of parchment on top of the crust, added pie weights, and baked it. The dough shrank a lot, probably more than a quarter-inch all the way around. And I just didn't have a good feeling about it -- maybe because pie crusts have always been my Achilles heel (yet another reason I rarely make pies).
I looked at the recipe again and realized that the ingredient list is almost identical to that for Bravetart's pie crust recipe that I swear by, although the mixing methods are quite different. I decided to make the crust again, but this time I used BraveTart's method -- making it by hand and squishing the cubes of butter flat between my fingers. I rolled out the dough to fit the bottom of the pan and chilled it for a few hours before baking (another part of the BraveTart method) before weighing it down and baking it. My second crust also shrank a bit, but it was less than my first attempt and I felt considerably more confident in the result.
The filling includes bananas that you roast in the oven with a little water and sugar (I skipped the optional rum) until the fruit is soft and leaking juices. You dump the roasted bananas and all of the liquid into a blender, puree it until smooth, and add sugar, egg yolks, heavy cream, milk, cornstarch, and salt. You turn the banana mixture into pudding by cooking it until it thickens; putting it through a sieve; and adding butter, vanilla, and softened powdered gelatin. I let the filling cool before putting a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface and putting it in the fridge to chill thoroughly.
Once the pudding was cold, I folded in whipped cream and spread the lightened custard on the crust. After chilling the bars for about an hour, I added a layer of lightly sweetened stabilized whipped cream (cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, salt, and heavy cream). I chilled the finished bars again before slicing them.
Kieffer warns that if you don't add a substantial amount of yellow food color to the filling, it will end up gray. I did add some food color, but it was natural color that didn't have much of an effect and my bars were slightly grayish. They filling and whipped cream topping held their shape when I sliced the bars, although the slices were not completely neat because the crust tended to crumble a bit around the edges of each slice. Still, I was happy that they held together, and I do think they were easier to slice and serve compared to a traditional pie.
I loved, loved, loved these bars. The filling was strongly flavored with banana, and it was simultaneously rich and creamy and very light at the same time. It's basically a diplomat cream (pastry cream stabilized with gelatin and cornstarch, with whipped cream folded in at the end), which is one of my favorite types of custard due to its light texture. The crust was crisp and didn't become soggy even after a few days the fridge. These bars are absolutely as good as a traditional pie. I happen to love banana cream pie, but I found this filling to be an upgrade from the traditional vanilla pudding. And even though there were no slices of banana in the final product, the banana flavor was there, loud and clear. Everything about these bars was so satisfying.
Recipe: "Banana Cream Pie Bars" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer.
Previous Post: "Baked Sunday Mornings: Banana Peanut Butter Cream Pie," May 20, 2012.
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