Banana Cream Pie with Chocolate-Chip-Cookie Crust (via epicurious + savory sweet life) | Pie Month

This is the 6th entry in our Month of Pie. Pie Month is a celebration of things we love. Because life is hard, and there should always be more pie. Have a look at the other entries. Really. 

Pie #1 - Lemon Cream Icebox Pie

Pie #2 - Malted Crisp Tart

Pie #3 - Apple Green-Chili Pie with Cheddar Crust and Walnut Streusel

Pie #4 - Peanut Butter Cream Pie with Chocolate Whipped Cream

Pie #5 - Butterscotch Cream Pie with Gingersnap Crust and Cashew Brittle

I’m live blogging while I taste this pie. Let's taste this pie together, kids.

It’s the chocolate curls that get me first. A vegetable peeler taken to a bar of 70% Bittersweet Scharffen Berger. I pinch a bit off the top to taste. Easy, fast, pretty, and barely sweet.


The knife goes easy into the pie. No resistance. Cutting through air, until it hits the crust, giving way to the blade as I swipe it from the center to the rim.


Another cut.


And then it’s time to contemplate the crust. Chocolate chip cookie dough peeks past the whipped cream. This is going to be great. I used our favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe from Alice at Savory Sweet Life, foregoing the usual chocolate chunks in favor of semi-sweet chips. The recipe calls for prepared cookie dough. You can do that, but we use Alice’s. These are the perfect cookies, making the perfect pie crust.

A fork goes in, swiping off the point. Creamy, banana, whipped cream, a hit of chocolate from on top, and a crunch+chew of the cookie crust chaser. A linger, barely, of rum. 


Forget the fork. 


This is pie to hold, to be caress, to love.


The other half of this pie went to the neighbors. Share the pie love.


recipe | Banana Cream Pie with Chocolate-Chip-Cookie Crust via epicurious.com
recipe | Chocolate Chunk Cookies via Savory Sweet Life

our favorite chocolate chunk cookies

It's been a week. And it's only Wednesday.

We're snowed in. Not unhappily so. But three small children aren't going to tolerate it for long. And the little car that came in the Cheerios box will not keep a three year old happy forever.

And snow just seems to beckon comfort food.

So we're making chocolate chunk cookies.

Because what else is there?

We take chocolate chip cookies very seriously (I'll get to the chunks in a second). I shudder to think how many different recipes we've tried in search of the perfect version. We need the cookie to be soft, crisp, sweet, salty (not overly, but present), and oozing chocolate. To add another requirement, it needs to bake perfectly when pulled from the freezer (hold, please, we'll come back and visit the freezer soon). That's a lot to ask, but some quests are worth it. After 13 years, we found our recipe.

Alice over at Savory Sweet Life has created what she calls The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe EVER! That's not an overstatement. It deserves the all caps and the exclamation point. Maybe an extra exclamation point. Alice apparently finds herself in Twitter schoolyard "my cookie recipe is better than yours" smackdowns on a regular basis. Do not fight with her. Just walk away. She wins.

Here's how we've made Alice's recipe our own...

Remember I said we like our chocolate oozing. We get the ooze on by chopping our own chocolate instead of using chips. Ain't a thing wrong with chips. They're handy and inexpensive, and Alice, I am not fighting you. But if you find yourself near a Trader Joe's, get yourself a 17.6 ounce bar of dark Belgian chocolate for about $5. Slap it down on your cutting board, and using the biggest knife you've got, start chopping. Some of it will flake which streaks the dough with slivers of chocolate. The chunks are what you're after, because when you bite into them after they come out of the oven and sit for a few minutes, you've got an ooze of chocolate in almost every bite.

Alice's recipe freezes perfectly which is good, because we need one or two cookies almost every night (we joined a gym so that we could keep our cookie habit). Instead of making a half batch, we use an ice cream scoop with a release mechanism to fill a baking pan full of unbaked cookies. Freeze them overnight, and then throw them into a plastic storage bag in the freezer. Pull out however many you need. Our oven cooks them perfectly at 360 for 14.5 minutes.

Cookies tonight. And tomorrow. And until this batch runs out and we need to make a new one.

Go visit Alice at Savory Sweet Life. And do not mess with her.

Recipe | The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe EVER!