Classic Banoffee Pie

This decadent recipe for classic banoffee pie combines bananas, toffee and whipped cream for a memorable dessert! 

This recipe for classic banoffee pie has been on my Must Make list for a million years, for two reasons.

First, it’s that pie that Keira Nightley offers to her husband’s best friend in the movie Love Actually, and I do love and adore that movie.

Second, for some reason the Southern husband heard about it, and that it involved bananas and cream and toffee and he NEEDED some.

So for both those reasons I started poking around for a recipe, and the vast majority of them involved boiling an unopened can of condensed milk in a pot of water, and even though I have demonstrated my extreme courage by zip-lining recently, there was NO WAY I WAS DOING THAT.

Visions of exploding cans of condensed milk danced in my head, and so I set out to make a banoffee pie that wouldn’t keep me up at night…and so this recipe came to be!

What is banoffee pie?

From everything I’ve read, it is a concoction that originated in the UK, and the name comes from a combo of toffee (which is a close cousin to caramel) and bananas.

You cook it up in a cookie crust (I used graham crackers) and frost the whole thing with whipped cream, and if you want to add some chocolate shavings that’s fine too.

Here’s how you make classic banoffee pie!

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and spray a 9 inch springform pan with cooking spray.

Put 12 graham crackers in a food processor and process until they are in crumbs.  Transfer to a mixing bowl, add a half cup of melted butter and smoosh the buttery crumbs into the bottom of the springform pan and up the sides about an inch.

Bake for 5 minutes and set aside.

Put 6 tablespoons of butter and 1/3 cup of brown sugar in a medium pot over medium heat.  Stir it up until the brown sugar and butter are melted together. 

Add a 14 ounce can of condensed milk and bring to a simmer, stirring constantly until the mixture is deep golden brown and thickened.  You’ve made toffee!  Without anything exploding!

Pour the toffee over the crust and top with 2 sliced bananas.  

Whip the cream and confectioner’s sugar together until the cream forms soft peaks.   Top with pie with the whipped cream and chill for 3 hours or more.  

When you are ready to serve, top with some chocolate shavings and dig in!

I think the only thing that could possibly make this pie even better would be a cup of red wine hot chocolate and snuggling up to watch Love Actually.

Merry happy delicious everything, my friends!