Banana Ice Cream Pie - Aug 19, 2012

When I was little, my Mom used to buy these pre-packaged ice cream pies that I don't remember the brand name of.  I do remember both a chocolate flavor and a banana flavor.  The banana was my favorite.  I was in love with these things.  They had a graham cracker crust and some sort of whipped cream topping.  The banana ice cream was a bright, sunshine yellow, and clearly flavored with some sort of fake banana flavoring concocted in a food science lab somewhere.



Well, I decided to try my hand at a homemade version, with Nick enthusiastically supportive of my plan.  I picked up a pre-made graham cracker crust, although I'm sure this would be extra gourmet with a baked-from-scratch graham cracker crust, see here, and here. 

Now, finding a banana ice cream recipe online proved to be more of a challenge than I had hoped, mostly due to the Kitchn's massively popular "one ingredient banana ice cream" recipe that became an Internet meme.  I'm sure it's awesome, but I wanted some cream in my ice cream, if you know what I mean.



I eventually decided upon Alton Brown's recipe, although it wasn't exactly what I was looking for (mostly due to the inclusion of light corn syrup).  I didn't follow directions exactly, but in the end this was an easy and relatively quick (the way I did it at least) way to make banana ice cream.  As you can see, mine is not the lovely, if potentially harmful, sunshine yellow of my memories, but the flavor was pretty close.

I ended up with a half a cup of heavy cream left over from the ice cream recipe, which was the perfect amount to make a whipped cream topping for my pie.  After filling the crust with ice cream, I popped it in the freezer while I whipped up the cream.  Then, I spread the whipped cream over the top of the pie in a thin layer and put the pie back into the freezer.  After a couple of hours, everything was ready.  Nostalgia on a plate.
 
 

And, speaking of nostalgia, here's another childhood favorite of mine.  It turns out that I had some ice cream left over after making the pie.  And it also turns out that I had purchased these chocolate wafers earlier in the summer from a great little bulk grocery store in downtown Osage, Iowa that we sometimes visit while staying with my parents in southern Minnesota.  How fortuitous!  While I actually prefer my ice cream sandwiches with the traditional vanilla ice cream, banana and chocolate is not a bad combination.