A funny little story

Before I left Australia my gorgeous friends at Pembroke gave me as a farewell present a year's subscription to delicious magazine. I adore finding the new instalment in my letterbox each month - I read it carefully from cover to cover and mark out the recipes I want to try. However, as we have no oven and no BBQ (I know, you'd think M would have lost his mind by now without a BBQ, believe me, we are craving some BBQ-goodness) my lofty culinary ambitions are somewhat thwarted, particularly when it comes to desserts.

However, in the June 2009 edition the "Curtis at Home" section had a simple and drool-worthy looking recipe for a banoffee pie that Curtis Stone describes as "a combination of banana and toffee in one incredible pie" hence - banoffee. Not the most original name ever, but Curtis is cute as a button and cooks like a dream, so we'll forgive him for being a little simple.

Now, when it came to collecting the ingredients, a little bit of substitution occurred - as often does.
For example:

• 255g packet digestive biscuits - well, we couldn't find digestives, so we got something that looked close enough.
• 160g unsalted butter - easy
• 5 small ripe bananas - easy
• 300ml thickened cream - impossible. The French have Creme Fluide which is in UHT type boxes and runny as milk, "Chantilly" which is sickly whipped cream in a can or "Creme Fraiche" which as we all know is essentially sour cream. I've used Creme Fraiche in desserts before and it was quite nice, so that's what we got.

Toffee Sauce

• 1/2 firmly packed cup (100g) brown sugar - no dice. Unbelievably we couldn't find brown sugar so we got some that was kind of.......latte coloured.
• 395g can sweetened condensed milk - easy
• 160g unsalted butter - sorted

Instructions are to make the crust by food processing the biscuits and butter -I don't have a food processor so Rachael and I unleashed our pent up rage and smashed the biscuits to smithereens by hand - eating a few on the way. When it came time to "press crumb mixture" over bottom and sides, we realised there wasn't enough to do the sides (probably shouldn't have eaten so many..whoops) so made a fairly solid cheesecake-like base. No problem we thought.

We then combined the sugar and some water to make toffee...........and waited........Curtis recommends waiting for a deep amber colour. Ours was amber-like....ish. So we chucked in the condensed milk, and butter (we had extra condensed milk so we had beefed up the quantities a little, no harm in having extra toffee sauce, right?) and what we had was...... extremely sweet and runny condensed milk that had kind of a grey straw colour. Hmmmm, Not good. Rach and Kym had brought us from Canada some real Maple Syrup, so we threw some of that in.

I hand whipped the Creme Fraiche and then mixed in the bananas. Creme wasn't really holding together that well though. Should be alright we thought.

Put it all together and............




Ha ha ha ha ha. Not good. Admittedly this is AFTER we'd served up the boys and ourselves bowls of what was described as "slightly banana-y tasting condensed milk with solid lumps of butter-y biscuits floating in it" and "sickly banana custard" and by M as "the result of a big night out on the piss". nice.

Oh Curtis. How you deceived us with your boyish good looks and simple recipe.

That'll teach us to substitute ingredients.

The moral of this story? France does not want me to bake/make desserts. Ok France, I hear you, loud and clear.

So - to comply with these orders, I am off to the patisserie to buy a tartlette au citron.