The Story Of A Famous Dessert

We have two Englishmen to thank for the famous banoffee pie pudding. In 1972, after seeing a dish during his travel in the USA, chef Ian Dowding and the owner of the restaurant he worked in (Nigel Mackenzie) created this new pudding. The American dessert was known as Blums Coffee Toffee Pie and was similar to banoffee pie but had no bananas and tasted (unsurprisingly) like coffee. Dowding wasn't keen on the recipe though as it was difficult to perfect, stating that the pudding didn't set correctly all the time, either being too hard or too soft.

Together they adapted the idea to toffee and bananas and made up the word "banoffi", which has now turned into "banoffee" and is now part of the English language used to describe anything that tastes of banana and toffee. So they added the new Banoffee Pie to their menu and found it became so popular that diners would actually request table bookings only if this particular dessert was on the menu. In fact, it became so popular that they simply could not remove it from the menu.

It didn't take long before the local competition was copying the dessert, and just a few years after the initial concept it started turning up in Australia, America and even India. It's fair to say that these days banoffee pie is probably served somewhere in every country on the planet!

Below is a delicious recipe for making your own banoffee pie Ingredients

3 large bananas, 300 gram packet of digestive biscuits, 60 grams of butter, 350ml double cream, 1 tbsp of icing sugar, 100 grams of chocolate (to decorate), 397g tin of caramel

1. Turn the oven on to pre-heat at 180C/gas mark four. Put the butter in a pan and leave over a low heat to melt. While the butter melts crush the biscuits (a rolling pin or blender will do the trick. Failing that, just use your hands!). Once the butter's melted mix the biscuit crumbs and butter together in a bowl.

2. Pour the biscuit mix into a 20cm (ish) pie tin and press into an even layer to create the base.

3. Place in the oven and allow to cook for 10 minutes. Check the mixture has lightly toasted, if it hasn't give it a couple more minutes.When you are happy take the base out the oven and let it cool. Once cool, carefully transfer the base to a plate.

4. Once cooled, open the caramel and pour evenly over the base. Once level, put in the refrigerator for roughly 60 minutes.

5. Once chilled, slice the bananas and arrange them over the caramel.

6. Whip the cream and icing sugar to get it nice and thick, and then create the final unhealthy layer over the bananas.

7. Take the chocolate and use a grater to sprinkle some chocolate shavings over the cream for the final touch.

Source - http://www.articlecity.com/articles/food_and_drink/article_3561.shtml