Afternoon Tea - Mini Banoffee Pies
For Mother’s Day last year, I shared a collection of recipes that you could make to create a beautiful afternoon tea for your ‘Mum’ (or whatever name she may have…Step Mum, Bonus Mum...) It’s a lovely way to show how much you appreciate them and you get to eat cake!
This year I have added another recipe to the afternoon tea collection, with these dainty Mini Banoffee Pies.
Banoffee pies were originally created by a fantastic restaurant called the Hungry Monk in my corner of the world…East Sussex. I was lucky enough to visit them on a few occasions and I always had the banoffee pie for dessert (why wouldn’t you!?). Unlike the mass produced banoffee pies of today, the original was made with a crisp shortcrust pastry base. The pastry is the perfect vessel, as it doesn’t take over the flavour or fill you up, but gives the light crunch to the soft caramel, ripe bananas and pillowy whipped cream.
You can either boil a can of condensed milk in a saucepan of boiling water for 4 hours to create the caramel (make sure the can is always submerged by topping it up with boiling water) or, as I did, buy condensed milk that is already caramel - you can find it in most UK supermarkets.
Mini Banoffee Pies
For the shortcrust pastry
250g plain flour
125g unsalted butter, cold and cubed
50g icing sugar
1 large free ranged egg
For the filling
1 tin of condensed milk that is caramel
2 fairtrade ripe bananas
300ml double cream
10g dark chocolate
Preheat oven to 170ºC
To make the shortcrust pastry, place the flour, butter and icing sugar into a food processor and whizz together until you have a breadcrumb texture. If you don’t have a food processor, you can do this by hand by rubbing the butter, flour and icing sugar together with your finger tips. Add the egg and whizz again until it comes together as a dough. Wrap in cling film and leave in the fridge to chill for 30 min-1 hour.
Once the chill time is up, remove from the fridge and roll out on a lightly floured surface, to the thickness of 3mm. Using a 8cm round biscuit cutter, cut out 12 discs. Lift each disc up and place into the base of a non stick muffin tin, lightly pressing them down into the base. Repeat until you’ve done all the pastry discs. Using a fork, lightly prick across the base of each case.
Place a small amount of baking parchment into each pastry case and fill with clay baking beans or uncooked rice to weight them down. Bake in the preheated oven for 8 minutes, then remove the baking parchment and baking beans/rice, and return the pastry cases to the oven for a further 4 minutes to allow the bases to become lightly golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before gently lifting out and placing on a wire rack to cool completely.
Meanwhile you can assemble and prepare the filling ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk the double cream into soft peaks and set to one side. Peel and cut the bananas into 5mm slices, slightly on the diagonal so they are nice a long.
Once the cases are cold, spoon in a heaped teaspoon of caramel, then lay 2 pieces of banana on top then finally a heaped teaspoon of whipped cream dolloped on top. For a final flourish, grate a small amount of dark chocolate over the tops of each one from a height, so that they become lightly speckled.
Serve immediately and enjoy!
There are more afternoon tea recipes that I have created over the years which you may also enjoy making as part of your Mother’s day treat, they can be found under the ‘Afternoon Tea’ tag on the side of the blog.
