Sweet Melissa Sundays: Coconut Custard Pie

I love being a part of Sweet Melissa Sundays baking group because I am continually learning new things in the realm of baking and sweet treats. I thought I was a decent baker, but didn't realize how limited my range of skills were with mostly experience in cookies, cakes and the very occasional pie. But there is so much more to be mastered! This weeks challenge is a custard pie....Coconut Custard Pie selected by Ruby of I Dream of Baking. Making custard is a first for me and this one came together very easily. The recipe calls mixing up the custard in a blender and then into the pie shell for baking.

I opted for 4 rustic mini's in ramekins and halved the filling recipe. I admit, I cheated on the crust this week to save time and bought the pillsbury refrigerated roll crust. Blind baking the crust in the ramekins (blind baking is also a first for me) was a little challenging. I ended up scrunching up pieces of foil and tucking them inside the crust. I pre-baked them for about 20 minutes (which may have been too long because by the time I baked the custard in the crust it came out much browner than I wanted it to be). Unfortunately I lost some of my rustic crust that overlapped the edge of the ramekin when it went into the oven. It wasn't quite sturdy enough to hold itself up.

I'm on the fence about coconut (love the flavor, not so in love with the texture). I opted to do 2 ramekins with coconut and 2 with caramelized bananas.



For the bananas I sliced them about 1/4 inch thick tossed them in lemon juice, laid them out on a foil lined baking sheet and topped each slice with a nice coating of sugar. Then I popped them under the broiler for about 5 minutes until they had a nice color. The one thing I forgot was to spray the foil with non stick spray so the bananas had to be gingerly removed. I filled each ramekin halfway with custard and laid in 5 or so banana slices and then topped it off with more custard. I baked the custard filled ramekins for about 35 minutes until they were set. As many of the other SMS bakers, I also topped off my mini's with fresh made whipped cream and a little toasted coconut and caramelized banana slices. Because like Tracey, I think everything is better whipped cream!





So? How did they turn out? The custard had a nice creamy texture, however it was not sweet enough for my taste. Hubby described it as, "blah". Though I added a heavy layer of coconut at the bottom of each ramekin the coconut flavor was very mild. And I still don't like the texture of coconut. Next time I will add more sugar and will replace milk with coconut milk to get the coconut flavor without the texture. The banana version was also on the blah side....should have doubled the number of banana slices inside and added a dash of banana extract. I would also omit tossing the bananas in lemon juice (it was recommended in a recipe I found to keep the bananas from turning brown...they added a little tang and kept the banana flavor from truly caramelizing).




I enjoyed the custard itself so I will be giving custard another try in the future...most likely without the crust. Thanks for hosting this week's recipe Ruby!