Banana Cream Pie

Last night, I made a banana cream pie just for fun. It was all homemade except for a store-bought pie crust. For those who are not well versed in the world, a banana cream pie is a pie crust with a sweet, creamy banana filling made of a couple bananas, milk, eggs, sugar, and a little vanilla extract with either a whipped cream or meringue topping. The filling was the easy part; all I had to do was make sort of a banana mush in a saucepan with all the filling ingredients. I simmered it over low heat until the mixture became more of a thick custardy texture. Then while letting that cool, I made the meringue topping. This was more difficult because if you don’t do it right, meringues aren’t good and can end up ruining the dish. All you have to do the meringue is beat egg whites and cream of tartar with sugar. It becomes a really fluffy and foamy and tastes really good. Then I put the filling into the pie crust and swirled the meringue on top. The hardest part of this was baking it right. If you undercook it, it is just mushy and gross, and if you overcook it, it gets hard and the filling can heat up too much and get too runny. Luckily for me, I did it just right, cooking it only about 8 minutes just until the tips of the meringue swirls were lightly golden-brown. It was hard to let it sit because I was so hungry but I had to let it cool for over two hours before I could eat it. I ate it with my family and everyone liked it!

Hope M.