Frozen banoffee pie

I got the idea for this recipe when watching Nigella’s Christmas series on TV a couple of years ago. She makes an icecream cake with a biscuit base, vanilla icecream filling and butterscotch sauce on top- so it seemed like a natural move (to me anyway) to add some bananas to that!!

The first time I made it was for Christmas 2008 and thanks to my over excitement and the lack of space in Sue’s freezer, we took it out too soon and were faced with a big, (but still delicious!) banoffee puddle for pudding. The second time around it was perfect. It’s incredibly moreish and the butterscotch sauce is heaven. In fact, you could make the sauce to go with any kind of icecream… or pudding really! If pushed for time you could use dulce de lech sauce from a jar, but the real stuff is amazing- try it just once.

By the way this cake cant be made all in one go, you have to freeze it for a few hours in between the icecream stage and topping it, so its handy for dinner parties, Christmas etc. when you want to do all the faffing around before hand and no hard work on the day.

Ingredients

• 1 ½ packs of Maryland double choc chip cookies or equivalent cookies (you may not need all of them
• 4 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 big tub of good quality vanilla icecream or two smaller (ben and jerry sized) ones- I use Green and Blacks with Madagascan vanilla
• 2 large ripe bananas
• 200ml double cream
• 150gms unsalted butter
• 185gms soft brown sugar
• 8inch springform tin

Method

1. About ½ hour before you want to make this get the icecream out of the freezer to soften- you want it to be spoonable but not liquidy.
2. Grease the springform tin then crush the packets of biscuits to crumbs. I get a rolling pin, and leaving the biscuit packets closed, bash the hell out of them- don’t do it too hard or they’ll explode!
3. In a large saucepan melt the 4tbsp butter and once melted, stir in the biscuits until well coated
4. Spoon the biscuit mix into the tin and press down with the back of a spoon to make a base (almost as if you were making a cheesecake).
5. Spoon in the icecream on top of the biscuits, smooth down until the base is fully covered and put the tin back in the freezer. It can stay there until you need it- probably up to a week if you cover it with some cling film.
6. Then make the butterscotch sauce, again this can be kept for up to four days in the fridge until you need it. Just put the butter, cream and sugar into a saucepan with a medium heat, once it has all melted bring to the boil and simmer for around 3mins stirring occasionally then leave to cool completely before refrigerating. Be careful- this will be hotter than Daniel Craig’s backside- you will get third degree burns if you get molten sugar on yourself and certainly do not lick the spoon!! Nick nearly learnt that lesson the hard way!
7. When you’re ready to serve the pudding, take it out of the freezer 20mins beforehand so the icecream can soften up.
8. Peel and slice the banana and arrange it on top of the icecream. Either take the butterscotch sauce out of the fridge an hour beforehand or warm it up for 10 seconds in the microwave.
9. To serve, lift the cake out of the tin and on to a plate (keep the base in place or it will all go tits up) then pour the sauce over and cut everyone big slices.

p.s. try and eat it all, or return it to the freezer once you’ve cut a few slices, you can’t re-freeze icecream once it has melted.