Banoffee pie – homemade dulce de leche

Banoffee pie is one of the easiest desserts to make – there’s no real cooking involved, just some butter-melting, some biscuit-smashing, some pre-emptive tin-boiling, some cream-pouring and some banana-slicing. Easy as . . . pie.

No cream in these photographs; I didn’t get that far before the pie was crumbled into bits by enthusiastic lunch guests. (I prefer my banoffee pie with pouring cream, although you’ll read many recipes which call for whipped cream. Follow your own preference.)

The gloriously gloopy toffee stuff in a banoffee pie is dulce de leche, an Argentinian caramelised milk sauce. You can buy it in jars from Merchant Gourmet in most supermarkets, but it’s very easy to make at home. Just cover an unopened tin of condensed (not evaporated) milk with water in a saucepan and boil for an hour and a half, making sure that the water stays topped up. The can won’t come under enough pressure to go pop. When your dulce de leche is finished, it will keep indefinitely in the can; I like to make several cans full at a time and keep some in the cupboard for my emergency pie needs. Use a permanent marker to identify your boiled tins – the paper will have come off them.

Banoffee pie uses a cheesecake base, which is easy to prepare and freezes well. If you make some spares and freeze them, you’ll have a near-instant dessert for the next time you have visitors.

For one pie, you’ll need:

20 digestive biscuits
3 rounded tablespoons butter
1 tin dulce de leche (see above)
5 bananas
Cream for pouring

Line a springform cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Crush the biscuits into crumbs. This takes a few seconds in the food processor, but if you don’t have one you can put them in a sealed plastic sandwich bag and wallop the bejesus out of them with a rolling pin. Melt the butter and combine with the crumbs until you have a stiff paste. Mould the paste in the bottom of the tin until you have a flan base with shallow sides. Don’t worry about being too tidy; you’ll be covering the base up in a while.Put the cake tin in the fridge for about an hour to harden.

When the pie crust is nice and solid, remove it from the cake tin and spread a whole tin of cooled dulce de leche on the base. Top this with chopped, fresh bananas. Pour over gouts of cream and serve.