Coconut Cream Pie

Before making this recipe I'd never eaten a coconut cream pie in my life. I'd had all manner of fruit pies - pineapple, blueberry, apple, peach, strawberry, apricot - but never a coconut cream pie, or any cream pie for that matter. Oh I'd had pumpkin pie, banoffee pie, sweet potato pie, lots of chocolate pies, even a mango pie ...OK, I'm starting to sound like Bubba from Forrest Gump, aren't I? 

Anyway, a reader once mentioned banana cream pie and that probably planted the seed in my head to make this pie. Now, I read the recipe through a couple of times, not wanting a repeat of the brown sugar chicken situation. I even measured out all my ingredients beforehand, which is something I do only on the most auspicious occasions.

But no matter how good of a cook you are, there are always moments in the kitchen that just knock you back to your childhood self when you tried to peel fa'i maka (green bananas) the traditional Samoan way and you ended up mutilating the banana so badly that the leftover stub was thrown at your head and then you were thrown out of the kitchen. 

This pie had a few of those moments, and I'm not ashamed to share them with you here. 

Recipe comes from Me'a Kai and can be found here. But don't blame the recipe for what you see below. Blame the cook who to this day, cannot really peel perfect fa'i maka.

Started by mixing the butter and sugar for the crust. So far so good, but hey, it's only two ingredients.

Pressed the very soft sticky dough into my baking dish. Smoothed it out as best I could. Not very smooth though, is it?

Prettied it up around the edges with a fork, then baked it.

Crust came out of the oven looking kind of sad and depressed. It had shrunk down to half its height and had just slithered to the bottom of the baking dish, looking like it had lost the will to go on. 

Coconut cream layer thickened up nicely,

as did the lemon cream layer.

Here's the finished pie.

When I was putting the lemon layer on the pie the coconut cream layer spread out to the sides. Not sure if my coconut layer wasn't thick enough or if I was supposed to let it set. In any case, the layers of the pie were not very even as you can see here. Also, my crust was slightly under-cooked in the corners where the pastry had collapsed. 

Of course, none of these points were enough to keep me from devouring the pie. It was truly delicious.