The banoffee pie that hijacked my Finnish dinner

A couple of weeks ago, we went to that Finnish pop-up restaurant, Hel Yes, and it inspired me to throw a Finnish meal together. It wasn’t like I was going to spear a reindeer and forage for lingonberries, but try my very darn-est I did. I browsed through my Moomins Cookbook (because every novice Finn cook must start with Moomins simple instructions) and came up with this pleb menu:

No starter because I’m a pleb

Meat & macaroni bake, served with beetroot salad

Apple pie for dessert

But then, somewhere along the line, my apple pie plans were foiled by Panu bugging me to make a banoffee pie instead, but that’s not all bad

The beetroot salad was a bit of a no brainer because I’d made this before, using Panu’s mum’s recipe. It’s the easiest salad ever to make but be warned the resulting RSI from chopping up 3 carrots, 8 beetroot and about 6 gherkins into teeny tiny cubes. Oh, and I topped the salad with dill this time, which is what any good Finnish person would do

The Moomins meat & macaroni bake is a pretty traditional Finnish recipe, mixing beef mince, onion and garlic with a delicious egg and milk mixture, paprika, all spice and dill. Chuck the whole thing in the oven and it comes out gorgeously brown!

Top it with cheese or breadcrumbs and nom nom nom nom nom!

The innards of the macaroni bake isn’t really the prettiest thing you’ll see, but look at the creamy goodness. Taste wise, I was ever so tempted to add more something to the simple recipe, like more spice or sauce or whatever, but I appreciate that this is how the Finns do it and this is how I shall leave it!

Now, moving onto the culprit that hijacked my Finnish meal. The Banoffee Pie.

“Banoffee” because it’s made of toffee and banana, but there’s cream too, so shouldn’t it be creamanoffee? Yes, yes it should. But it isn’t.

I blatantly stole this recipe directly from the Nestlé site but WARNING! The site also tells you how many calories are in each slice of this holy-mother-of-EVIL pie and trust me, none of you actually want to know this information.

Ok ok I’m gonna tell you. But look away if you don’t want to know!

This one tiny slice of pie has more calories than a Big Mac. 499 calories per slice to be precise. FML I ate three slices.

But how could I not? It is sooooooo fracking delicious, the gooey toffee mushed up against the butter-soaked biscuit base and all that cream! and banana! and as if we weren’t fat enough, topped off with chocolate! Wait, at least the banana is healthy, right? Right.

Anyway the creamanoffee pie totally hijacked my Finnish dinner. I’m still going to try the apple pie out of the Moomins cookbook though, so stay tuned for that! For now, if you feel so inclined to exceed your daily recommended calorie intake in one sitting, feel free to follow the recipe below to glutton hell…

ps. recipe for beetroot salad can be found here.

pps. the Moomins cookbook is awesome fun, with loads of simple recipes for kids.

ppps. a Big Mac has 490 calories.

pppps. Charmaine also just gave me The Scandinavian Cookbook like yesterday so lots more Scandi treats to come!