- Today, we are making banana cream pie.

I am so excited to be sharing this recipe with you.

It is a lot of steps, but stick with me because I think you are going to love it.

Let's get started.

(soft music) One of the things I absolutely love about this banana cream pie is the fact that you can make all of the components ahead of time and then assemble when you're ready to serve it.

So what we have here is a shortbread shell that's already been baked.

We have a pastry cream, we have banana jam, some whipped cream, and bananas, which is all you need to make the most delicious banana cream pie you'll ever have.

The first thing we're going to make for our banana cream pie is the banana jam, and honestly, this is some of the most delicious stuff I think you're ever going to try.

It's great for the banana cream pie, but goodness, you could eat it just out of a bowl.

You could eat it on toast, on pancakes, a variety of things.

The first thing we need to do is actually mash up our bananas and what I have here are 1 1/2 bananas that I've sliced and we're just gonna give them a nice mash.

I just take a fork and kind of mash them up against the side.

You don't have to get them like totally mashed up, but you definitely want them to start breaking down before you heat them up with your brown sugar.

And one of the things that I was thinking is really, this is a different version of like bananas foster without the alcohol, but mm, that might be in the next jam, a little bit of rum.

But for this version, we're just keeping it nice and easy.

So, okay, here we go.

We've got our bananas are getting sufficiently mashed up and I think we're just going to let them sit, set them aside while we get the rest of our ingredients ready to add our bananas.

So, all right, so here's our bananas.

They're just gonna hang out in a pan.

We are going to put 1/4 of a cup of brown sugar with 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt.

Get that in our pan.

To that, we are adding two teaspoons of lemon juice, freshly squeezed.

And all we're gonna do now is just kind of stir that up, get that incorporated a little bit, and we're just going to bring this particular mixture to a boil so that the sugar melts and then we're just gonna add our bananas in until it becomes jam.

So let me turn our burner on.

This is an induction burner.

I don't know if you guys have ever used one, but it really heats up fast and it brings this mixture to a nice boil pretty quickly.

So I don't want to leave it.

I want to keep watching it because I don't want my brown sugar to burn, but see, you see, it's boiling along the edges, which is great.

I'm gonna turn down my heat a little bit on the burner and to that, then I am adding our bananas.

So just put them all in.

And what we're gonna do is stir, stir, stir until it becomes nice and jammy consistently.

And I've got a runaway banana there.

There we go.

All right.

So now let's just get that incorporated in and I'm just going to keep stirring with my spatula.

You can see now, the sugar added with the bananas are getting kind of syrupy.

So I'm gonna turn my burner back up just a little bit.

The thing is, you have to be really careful.

You don't want to have your heat too high, not just because the brown sugar mixture could burn, but more so it'll start to splatter at some point, and gee, there is nothing comfortable about getting splattered with hot, delicious, syrupy banana and brown sugar mixture.

So we're just going to continue to stir.

I don't want anything getting burnt in the corners, on the edges.

You can kind of see, I think, at least I hear it, where it's boiling.

I think now you can see that.

And so again, just keep stirring, keep stirring.

The original recipe that I use said five minutes, but honestly, I always wonder sometimes if it has taken me anywhere from seven minutes, eight minutes.

I think it just depends on the ripeness of your bananas.

So this is what we're gonna do.

We're gonna keep stirring.

Now, the thing that we're gonna look for though, too, is this will darken in color a little bit.

You'll be able to see a change in color, but you're also going to see where your consistency is gonna get jammy and thicker.

So right now, we're still kind of a little on the thin side, so we're gonna keep stirring, keep stirring.

And our true test will be, we're gonna take the spatula at some point and run it along the base of our saucepan and as you can see, when we do it now, it all runs back together.

So what we really want is when we run this spatula down the middle of our pan, that it stays.

We can see the indentation.

We can see the parting of the jam, so to speak.

But we're not quite there yet, so I'm just going to continue to stir.

You know what I just thought of?

This stuff would be delicious on like a variation of a banana split with ice cream.

Oh, my God.

I really hope you guys at least try this part of the recipe because it is out of this world delicious.

So we're gonna keep stirring and here we go.

So here, now you can see where my spatula is leaving a nice indentation.

It does go back to the center, but it's slow to go back to the center.

So it's really now personal preference for you if you want it to get a little jammier and so you keep it on a little bit longer, but I think it's pretty good for our pie purposes today.

And so I'm just gonna turn my burner off.

I'm gonna take this off the heat and to our mixture, I am adding just a teaspoon of vanilla.

So we add it at the end because we don't want our flavor to burn off.

We just want all of that delicious vanilla flavor incorporated.

And there you have it, your banana jam.

Now, we are going to just, I'm gonna use this bowl and pour the jam in because we need the jam to cool.

So just set it aside at least for an hour.

Just cover it up, set it aside, and we will now go on to our next banana cream pie component.

Next, we're gonna start on our pastry cream.

Full disclosure, you guys, this is probably the least favorite thing that I'm making for the banana cream pie.

It's delicious, but I always fear the pastry cream not doing what it should.

So fingers crossed that it's gonna work for us today.

What we have in terms of ingredients are 1 1/4 cups of whole milk.

We have three egg yolks that I've separated the whites from.

We have 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, 1/4 cup of corn starch.

Don't judge me.

I know that there are times when you can make a beautiful pastry cream without it, but it helps us to make it more consistent.

We have 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla and we have a tablespoon of butter.

So the first thing we're going to do is get our milk going just to a simmer.

Now, I am not gonna turn on this induction burner right now, only because it's so quick that I'm gonna mix up my other things first and then we'll simmer it up.

But I just wanted you to know that it's a little bit out of order here from what we would normally do.

So, okay.

I'm gonna take my sugar here.

I am adding my three egg yolks.

I am going to add my vanilla and my corn starch all to the bowl here, and then, oops.

I get corn starch wherever else it wants to fly.

Do you ever notice that corn starch just, it just goes everywhere?

All right, so now, let's get this ready.

So all I'm doing is whisking together our egg yolks with our sugar and our corn starch and getting corn starch powder all over the place.

But that way, then it'll be ready for me when I do get my milk to a simmer, which is the goal of all of this.

So here, we have everything incorporated here.

It's nice and smooth.

Isn't that a pretty color?

I just love that color.

I'm sure if I had different eggs, it would produce even a more orangy color, but I just love that little lemon color.

That's kinda cool.

All right.

So now, let's turn on our burner and we're just bringing our milk to a simmer.

So on this induction burner, I mean, honestly, it's only gonna take a couple seconds.

If I were doing this on just a regular stove top, it might take a minute or two.

You just want to see little bubbles around the edges.

We don't want to bring the milk to boiling.

So a watched pot never boils, but we're gonna keep an eye on it.

We don't want the milk to scald.

And in fact, I'm just gonna kinda take it and maybe whisk it a little bit, just to make sure that it's evenly heating.

And what we're going to do once it does get up to temperature is we are going to temper our eggs.

So as I learned in my pastry program, if we were to pour this warm milk into this egg mixture, I mean, all we would get is a lot of scrambled eggs.

So by tempering our egg mixture, we're just gonna slowly pour our milk in, bring it up to the same temperature, and voila.

Then hopefully we won't have scrambled eggs because we're adjusting the temperature of our eggs gradually.

So I'm seeing a few little bubbles here and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to now very, very slowly pour our milk and whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, while I'm doing this, pour our milk into our egg mixture.

So the other day when I was making this, I think it got more milk outside of the, see?

See, more milk outside than I did inside.

This time, not too bad, actually, for me.

So here we're whisking, whisking, whisking because I want to make sure that my eggs don't cook.

So I'm just keeping them moving and then we're going to pour this back into our saucepan and we're gonna turn the heat back on at a low to medium temperature.

And there we go.

And we're just going to continue to whisk until this whole mixture thickens.

So this with the corn starch should really only take a couple minutes at most, but the point of this is to do not walk away.

Don't leave it.

It will become thick quickly and when it does, you want to make sure that you take it off the heat at that point.

Otherwise, you're just gonna have one big, burned mess on your hands.

So we're gonna continue our whisking.

You can feel it when it starts to thicken and I'm not quite at that stage yet.

When it does get to the consistency we want, then we're gonna add our butter, gonna clean up my mess, and we're gonna take our pastry cream and we're gonna sieve it through a fine gauge sieve so that we can get any little bumps or lumps out, because no one likes a lumpy pastry cream.

Okay, I can start to feel it thickening.

I can feel it on my whisk.

You can see kind of slightly how it's almost bubbling.

I want to take it off at this point and continue to whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk.

I don't want the milk and the eggs to separate.

That would not be good.

All right, and it's looking great.

I am going to move my burner over and so you guys can see it here.

And now we're just going to add our butter into our mixture.

We're gonna make sure our butter gets melted and incorporated.

That butter was at room temperature, so it'll melt a little bit easier, but this is looking great, you guys.

Oh, I'm so relieved.

This is a wonderful thing when our pastry cream turns out.

It smells great and I don't see any huge lumps.

I don't see it separating.

It's thickened up nicely.

And here you go, guys, some delicious vanilla pastry cream.

(soft music continues) Our pastry cream is finished.

So we want to make sure that we put it through a sieve and get any little lumps, any little maybe egg clusters that are hiding in our cream out because we want a silky, silky, smooth pastry cream.

So what I have here is just in the bowl, I have a fine mesh sieve, and I'm just taking, I'm getting all of our goodness.

Honestly, since I don't like making it, I want to waste any of it and have to do it again.

So here we go.

And maybe one day I'll get over my fear of pastry cream, but for right now, it's still there.

Anyway, here we go.

We're just going to stir it and get it to go through the sieve.

Try not to push too hard because, I mean, then you're gonna end up pushing the lumps through and kinda defeating your purpose.

But as you can see, we're just moving it around.

It's coming out the other side, which is great.

It's nice and thick, which is exactly what we want.

Now, we're gonna let this cool once we get it in the bowl and once it's cool, we're gonna lighten it up with some whipped cream for right now, at least for our pie purposes.

Maybe if we were making eclairs or something, we would leave the pastry cream exactly as it is, but for the pie, we're gonna lighten it up with some cream, but we're gonna do that after it cools down and that way, then our cream doesn't just totally deflate.

That extra cream makes it nice and fluffy and even more delicious.

So here we go.

I think I've gotten every last bit of pastry cream goodness.

And I don't know if you can see this, but the spatula says "I only have pies for you."

Isn't that cute?

A friend of mine gave that to me.

So, all right.

I'm gonna cover this with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge and we'll go on to making our crust.

Moving on to our dough for our banana cream pie.

Today, we're making a pâte sucrée, or a sweet pastry dough.

It's really kind of like a shortbread cookie almost in dough form.

So we are making it in the mixer.

Might be a controversial topic, I'm not really sure, but I can tell you I've done it a lot and it's delicious this way.

So what I have here is nine tablespoons of butter.

For any of my pastry doughs, I use the European butter.

It just has more of a moisture content and it gives the pastry just a nice, richer flavor.

But if you don't have it, regular butter will do.

And it's unsalted, too, by the way.

So to our nine tablespoons of butter, we are adding 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, but this sugar is the ginger sugar that we've done a little video on to show you how to actually make infused sugars.

So I am adding it to our particular dough today because it just adds an extra element of flavor and is delicious with the bananas and the banana jam.

So, all right.

We're gonna cream those together and make sure our bowl is in place and just get that incorporated and creamy.

The nice thing about this European butter is it softens to room temperature quicker than the regular standard butter, but it also just produces a nice, creamy, creamy texture as you're beating it up.

So we're just gonna let that go for a minute or so 'cause we really kinda want to lighten it up, get it nice and fluffy.

And while that's doing its thing, I'm gonna grab a spatula.

Okay, so I showed you my pie one.

There's my dog one, also an awesome spatula.

Gotta have a little bit of fun while you're doing this, right?

All right, so I am going to break down my sides and make sure I get everything off of the bowl and into the bowl because the next thing we're gonna do is we are going to add one whole egg, and I have it right here.

So to our butter and sugar mixture goes our egg.

And now we're going to mix that up, get that nice and creamy and incorporated.

And once that gets incorporated, we're gonna get it off the bowl again, scrape it down, and then we're adding 1 1/3 cups of all-purpose flour with 1/4 teaspoon of salt to that.

So let me just turn it up a little bit, get that in there.

Lovely.

All right, so now scrape down again and even scrape like the bottom of the bowl.

I know when I mix things, a lot of times, there is ingredients on the very bottom of the bowl that the mixer just doesn't quite reach.

So get everything nice and together.

I'm just gonna let this go for just a minute or so more.

If it's looking a little curdly, don't worry.

It's just that the egg was probably a little bit cooler than the butter, but it'll incorporate really well into the dough.

All right, that's looking good now.

And now I'm just gonna get it started.

I'm gonna put my flour in gradually, but I am just gonna start by putting a little bit in, turn the mixer on, and then kind of slowly add the rest of the flour mixture.

Keep it on low if you don't want flour all over yourself and your kitchen and your counter, but see, I'm just gradually adding the flour in.

And we just want it to get to the point where it's combined, right?

We don't want to over-mix it.

Makes for a tough dough.

But here we go.

It's coming together nicely.

I think you guys can see.

And now we're just going to dump it out on a lightly floured board, bring it all together, wrap it up, and we're gonna put it in the refrigerator and let it sit for probably about a couple hours.

Our pie dough has come together in the bowl as much as we want it to.

So now we're just going to dump it out onto, I like my silicone mat.

You can dump it out onto a counter or you can dump it out onto a board, whatever you prefer, but you can see that there still are pieces that are crumbly and I want to get every last bit that I can out.

And so now, just very gently get the dough off of my doggy spatula and all I'm going to do is just bring this together with my hands.

I am not kneading.

I am not doing anything dramatic with the dough at this point.

I just want to bring it together.

So you can see, it's come together nicely.

I love that European butter.

And so now, all we're gonna do is put it in a piece of plastic wrap and get it all nice and covered up.

I like to shape it in a bit of a disc so it makes it easier for rolling out when we're ready.

And now we're gonna take this and we're gonna let it sit in the refrigerator for probably about two hours.

It can stay longer if it needs to.

You can do it the next day, which is also awesome to get everything ready ahead of time.

But right now, we're putting it in the refrigerator, and when it's done, we'll be back to roll it out.

(soft music continues) Our pie dough has sat in the refrigerator for a couple hours and so now we're ready to roll it out.

So what I have here again is my silicone mat that I'm going to just throw a little bit of flour on and roll it out.

You want to have your pie pan, tart pan, whatever it is that you're using ready so that once we roll it out, we can move it over to the tart pan itself.

And I'm using an eight-inch tart pan with a little one-inch side, but you can use nine-inch, you can use higher sides, whatever your heart desires.

So, okay.

I like to kind of flour up my top so that my pin doesn't stick all the way to the dough, but what we're gonna do is we start in the middle and we're just going to gently roll.

Don't worry about those cracks because since this is a shortbread type of a dough, it will be so easy for us to just fill in the pieces if we can't and I'm pretty sure we probably won't get this over all in one piece.

So I'm just giving you fair warning, but trust me, it doesn't matter.

We're gonna pre-bake it and do some blind baking with it and it will all kind of meld together and taste delicious as well.

So, again, I'm just from the middle and kind of going back and forth.

And we want to, if you like, I mean, we can kind of even those up.

I am looking for my scraper, which I seem to have misplaced.

So sorry, guys.

I'm just getting out another one because you can kinda keep it from sticking to the back of the board or to the mat.

Even though these silicone mats are awesome, sometimes there's some sticking that happens with our dough.

So here we go.

We're gonna continue.

I want this to be at least two inches rounder than my eight-inch bottom.

So the other beauty of this particular silicone mat is the fact that I've got inches.

It tells me how far out I'm actually going.

So it gives me a guide.

Also, the rolling pin that I'm using has nice little 1/8-inch edges.

So as long as I keep both ends on the flat surface, I know that I'm not going to like over-roll and make one side thinner than the other.

So, all right, this looks like a pretty good size for us.

I really do love the flexibility of this dough.

It's not quite as fussy and that's because, see, it's coming apart as we speak, which is quite all right.

And trust me, when I move this over to my pan, it's not gonna be pretty, but we'll get it over there and we'll make it work.

So, you see, it's just this.

This is really crumbly, you guys.

So what we're gonna do, we're gonna go to Plan B here and we're gonna take our pan and we're just going to start patching it into our pie plate.

So, see?

See how forgiving this dough is?

Because when we actually bake it up, no one, not that anyone is going to look at your dough and say, oh, look at those pieces, but you're not gonna be able to tell.

But here we go.

So we're getting our bottom crust all in.

And the other thing that we're going to do, too, before we actually blind bake is, and because we're messing with it like this so much, so we're going to dock, which is to take a fork and we're gonna make little holes all over our pie dough crust here so that it doesn't bubble up in certain spaces.

We want it to be relatively flat.

But then after we dock it, we're gonna put it in the freezer and let it firm up.

We wouldn't want to put it in the oven like this, even as a blind bake, because it'll shrink and it just won't give you the lovely outline of a tart shell or pie shell that we're going for here.

So, see, it's just going all around.

I'm getting it nice and as flat as I can.

I really just want to get it all covered up right now and then I'm gonna even it out and I'm gonna press this down and so that we have all of our areas covered.

And then we're gonna even out our top because we want a beautiful little scallopy top for our pie shell.

And see, you can see, there's a little hole.

So I'm just gonna take that little piece and incorporate it in.

And now all I'm doing here is just kinda flattening out.

I'm gonna take my knuckle and just gently kinda get us nice in the edges.

Now, I didn't butter this pie pan, but no worries.

There's enough butter in the dough that it's not gonna stick.

It is really all going to be fabulous.

Trust me.

And again, that's why I really, you can play around with the dough like this and it doesn't really, it doesn't change the texture or the overall flavor.

It's delicious.

So here we go.

I just want to add some extra pieces right here.

And our dough is in the pan.

Yay!

And now we just want to make a nice little edge on top.

So I'm just gonna take my rolling pin and gently go over the top so we have our nice little scallopy edges here, get that all cleared off.

And then I can see where I need to maybe thin out in certain areas here.

And you're probably thinking, why in the world is she being so fussy?

But it's all worth it in the end because when your pie shell comes out nice and brown and beautiful, you are going to be thrilled.

So here you have it.

All I'm gonna do next is I'm going to put little holes in with a fork and then I'm gonna stick it in the freezer, let it freeze up for about 15 minutes, and then we'll be ready to come back and blind bake our shell.

Our pie crust has been in the freezer now for 15 minutes and it's firmed up really nicely, so now we're going to blind bake our crust.

Blind baking is just getting it in the oven ahead of time, getting it nice and brown, and just baking so that it can be a standalone, actually, which is what we're doing now, because all of our other components are already made and we don't need to bake them along with the crust.

So in order to blind bake, what we are going to do is we are going to take these beans, put them in the pie crust on top of this parchment paper.

So I've crumpled the parchment paper up because it makes it really nicely malleable to get those beans in all of the areas that you need to get them in.

So, you see, we're just putting our parchment paper here that I cut out ahead of time.

Plus, look at my little scallops.

I mean, why not?

If you can make them pretty, well, it doesn't take any extra time.

And now I'm adding my beans and all I'm gonna do is just kinda press the beans down.

You want to make sure that the beans are up against the sides, as well as all of the bottom of the crust, because this is just gonna keep it from getting bubbles or from baking unevenly.

So now, in our preheated 350 oven, we're gonna place our pie crust with our beans.

We're gonna blind bake it for about 15 minutes.

We're gonna take it out.

Then we're going to put the beans back in.

And by the way, these beans are reusable, so don't pitch 'em.

And once we remove the beans, we're gonna place the pie crust back into the oven and let it bake for about 10, maybe 15 minutes, depending on your oven and whatever the pie crust is looking like.

We want it to get nice and brown.

So now we're gonna put it in.

(soft music continues) Our pastry cream now has cooled off nicely and we need to lighten it up with some whipping cream.

So what I have here in the bowl is two cups of heavy cream, to which I am going to add a tablespoon, because I like it real vanilla-y, if that's a word, flavor, and then I have 1/2 a cup of confectioner's sugar.

Some people don't want to put any sugar at all in.

That's fine.

Some people put in less, some people put in more, but for me, 1/2 a cup works.

So I'm putting that all in the bowl and now I'm just going to gradually turn my mixer on and whip away.

It's my MO.

I always have a messy kitchen.

So now it looks like my whipped cream is getting a nice consistency.

I am not only going to use this whipped cream to add to my pastry cream, but I'm also going to use it to decorate.

So I want it so that it holds and it's firm, as it is, but you never want to whip cream too much, or you end up with butter.

So here we have it.

Let me get my beaters off here.

Get that whipped cream off of there, that deliciousness.

Oops, sorry.

And now let's take some of it and lighten up our pastry cream.

Now, to lighten up the pastry cream, the problem is, we don't want to add all of our whipped cream to it at once because the pastry cream is heavier than the whipped cream and so then what will happen is the whipped cream basically deflates and you don't get that nice fluffiness in your pastry cream.

So I'm putting our pastry cream into a larger bowl here and then I am going to add just a little bit of our whipped cream at a time to try and incorporate the whipped cream a little gradually to just get it so that it's pretty much not quite as light.

It'll never be as light as the whipped cream.

We don't want that sort of texture, but we want to start to equalize it and get it blended into the pastry cream itself.

So I'm not being very aggressive.

I'm trying to be gentle.

I don't want to deflate the whipped cream and lose our effort to that we just made to whip this all up.

But as you can see, the cream's getting a lighter color and if you were here, you would feel that it actually is becoming lighter itself.

So I want to add a little bit more here, but I'm gonna save, like I said, I'm saving some for us to decorate our actual pie.

And here we go.

We'll just incorporate this.

It's really to taste.

Some people like a little more of the whipped cream in their overall pastry cream.

I'm kind of a medium of the road girl, but I can feel this.

It's feeling lighter.

It's just feeling nice and creamy and smooth and delicious.

So I think we're ready here.

This is nice and creamy and smooth.

And now we are ready to put it into our finished pie shell and decorate it up and try some of our delicious banana cream pie.

So this is actually the best part, as far as I'm concerned, where we put it all together.

The first thing we're going to do in our finished pâte sucrée, or sweet crust, is put our banana jam.

So let's just layer that in our pie first.

Honestly, if you guys could smell this, this is just the most fabulous, sweet, brown sugary, banana smell imaginable.

So I'm just spreading it out here so I can get an even layer across my shell.

Here we go.

And then next, we're going to layer some fresh bananas that I've sliced up, and I just use my fingers.

I know, you guys, but it's the easiest way to do it.

And all you're gonna do is just put them, you don't really have to put them in any sort of pattern, fancy or otherwise.

Shocking for me to say, but we're just covering this up with pastry cream.

So just get a nice even layer of bananas on your pie here.

We're just continuing our circles.

Sometimes if you have a banana or two left, you can either eat them or you can kinda squish where you've placed your existing bananas together so that you have more room.

So, yeah, I have a little extra space, so I'm just going to push those together more and put one there.

And it looks like we could probably put one right there.

There we go.

So there's our layer of banana jam and bananas.

And to that, now we are just going to layer on our delicious lightened pastry cream.

So I'm just gonna start with a couple dollops in the center and then spread this out.

Now, if we had chosen to do a pie crust that had higher sides, we could probably add a whole lot more, but this is gonna be rich enough and delicious enough.

You'll see that.

You'll understand why I chose the shorter sides.

So I'm just, again, spreading this.

It looks like we could use a little bit more, and hey, who doesn't want to have some extra pastry cream anyway?

It's delicious on its own with some fresh fruit, any way you like it.

I'm sure you can figure out lots of ways to use leftover pastry cream.

So, okay.

So here we have our layer of pastry cream over our jam.

It's nice and even.

I'm not worried about being perfect because it's gonna get gobbled up pretty quickly anyway, and now, here's our whipped cream.

I've put it in a pastry bag here.

And I mean, you can do whatever you want.

You could probably just lump all of your whipped cream on and it would look beautiful.

It certainly would taste wonderful, but because I kinda get a kick out of the decorating piece, I am just going to put dollops of cream all the way around.

And then I always do the outer side first, because then I kind of decide what's my mood.

Do I want to go inward and do it on the full pie, or do I just want to leave it at the edges?

It's pretty like that, but hey, this is not a situation where less is more in my opinion.

So we're just gonna take the rest of our whipped cream and we're gonna continue to just spread it through.

I think I have just enough to get us fully covered.

I do.

And oh, my goodness, you guys.

Look at this.

It is the most beautiful and delicious banana cream pie I think you're ever going to taste.

So please, please try it.

I know it's a lot of steps, but it's well worth the effort.

Enjoy.

Finally, we sliced this baby up.

Look at the creaminess of it.

I can't wait to taste it.

I have to make sure I get everything.

I want to get a little bit of that crust.

I want to get some of that delicious banana jam.

I mean, that is just delightful.

The creaminess from the pastry cream, from the whipped cream on top, and then get that little bit of crunch, ginger flavor that we put in with the ginger sugar in the crust.

Honest to God, this is a little piece of heaven.

I hope you enjoy it.

(soft music continues)