Banoffee Pie Recipe

One food that I discovered in Ireland was Banoffee pie. It's pretty simple - a graham cracker crust (or if we were actually in Ireland, a crust made with digestive biscuits), toffee, bananas, and whipped cream. I've been wanting to make something from my time abroad and this seemed like it would be simple enough! (As it turned out I made quite a large mistake, which you'll see in a bit...)

I used this recipe, with just a couple adjustments. As I said, digestive biscuits aren't very readily available here, so I just substituted it with a graham cracker crust. The rest of the ingredients are very easy to get here, but since it's a UK recipe the measurements may look a little unfamiliar. I'll rewrite the ingredients list here:

1 graham cracker crust

Toffee:
100g (about 1 stick) butter
100g (about 1/2 cup) brown sugar
397g (one can) condensed milk (not sweetened!)

Toppings:
4 small bananas
whipped cream
grated chocolate (I didn't actually include this)

You can get more detailed instructions at the link above, so I'm just going to share my process through pictures. I might not have taken a picture of every single step, sometimes its hard to remember to do that while you're cooking and trying not to burn anything!


These are the ingredients I used for the graham cracker crust. It's much easier with a box of prepared crumbs instead of having to crush them yourself, and the box has a recipe right on it for the crust. All you need is the crumbs, sugar, and butter.

Here's the assembled crust. Since the pie isn't baked after the toffee is put in, I baked the crust a few minutes by itself (again, the crust recipe should tell you how to do this).

Next comes the toffee making process. It starts by melting butter in a pan. 

Now, here comes the big mistake that I made. The recipe calls for "Carnation condensed milk". In my mind, that translated to sweetened condensed milk, which made sense to me for making a toffee (plus most other recipes for banoffee pie do call for sweetened condensed milk). But, the recipe actually just called for condensed milk. The toffee ended up much sweeter and thicker than it was supposed to be. So, here's a warning for you: don't use sweetened condensed milk! We still ate the whole pie, but I'll definitely be trying it again and following the recipe a bit more closely.

(Note: my dad liked this really sweet version, but he was outvoted by the rest of the family!)

The toffee boils for a couple minutes on the stove to caramelize and thicken.

After the toffee is finished, it goes right into the baked crust to cool off. The pie is meant to be eaten cold. We decided not to put the bananas on right away, because they tend to get brown when they sit in the fridge like that.

Before eating, add sliced bananas and plenty of whipped cream!