Dulce de Leche Banana Toffee Pie {Happy Birthday, Our Best Bites!}

Our Best Bites started as a small creative outlet where we could organize and share recipes with family and friends. We never imagined it would grow into this wonderful community and we’re so grateful to the readers who have followed along, welcomed our stories, and made our recipes a part of their own lives.

To celebrate this year’s blog-aversary, let’s eat some pie! This indulgent Dulce de Leche Banana Toffee Pie (commonly called “Banoffee Pie” in some places) starts with a chocolate cookie crust that’s layered with rich dulce de leche, fresh sliced bananas, and crunchy chocolate-covered toffee bits. We top it off with a rich whipped cream, brown sugar, and cream cheese topping and more toffee bits. It’s truly to die for!

Ingredients Needed

This is just a preview of ingredients and method, keep scrolling for full printable recipe.

• Sweetened condensed milk – This is the one and only ingredient for our dulce de leche layer. We cook it slowly in the oven until it turns into a golden caramel. This step can be done ahead of time if needed.
• Heavy whipping cream – Heavy cream has stabilizers that help set the filling into a sliceable pie. You can probably get away with regular whipping cream in a pinch, but your pie will not firm up quite as well and may not slice cleanly.
• Powdered sugar – Adds a little sweetness to our cream.
• Cream cheese – Cream cheese adds another layer of flavor and stability to the filling. Full fat or low fat are great, but avoid fat-free.
• Brown sugar – A touch of brown sugar adds depth to the filling and another layer of caramel flavor.
• Chocolate cookie pie crust – A store bought crust works great here. If you’d like to make your own, you could use this Graham Cracker Pie Crust recipe, but use chocolate wafers instead of graham crackers and omit the cinnamon. You could also use the chocolate cookie crust from this White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake, but note that it’s going to make much more crust than you need for a pie.
• Bananas – These should be ripe, but firm. The peels should be yellow all over, with perhaps a few small brown speckles. Avoid bananas that still have green on the peel, or heavily spotted, soft bananas.
• Chocolate covered toffee bits – Find these on the baking aisle by the chocolate chips. Sometimes they have toffee bits without the chocolate and those will work as well, if that’s what you prefer.

Once we’d had a few months to get settled in our new location, reality started setting in: we were far from our friends and family. Real life was expensive. We had a baby and a toddler in a completely unfamiliar place. The economy was getting worse. I felt so lost.

Sara and I had talked about starting a cooking blog for awhile. Cooking blogs were in their very baby stages and we had very modest expectations for what we hoped it would be–mostly a place to organize our recipes for ourselves and share our recipes with our friends and families. A fun hobby. Something to keep us busy. So four years ago tomorrow, we launched our humble little blog with a few of our favorite recipes and hoped that maybe someone would come and read them.

Imagine our surprise when, after a month or so, we started getting comments from people we didn’t know. It was kind of terrifying and exhilarating and fun all at once. We changed our look, we changed our name, we changed our look a few more times. We learned as we went along and suddenly…we had all these readers, all these friends, people who actually kind of cared about our recipes and our stories and the things we were sharing. And, slowly, I started finding myself again.

We get lots of emails and comments that bring us so much happiness (don’t get me wrong, we get a lot that make us want to write a book about crazy people, too!), from the little things like finally showing up your mother-in-law with your homemade dinner rolls to stories so emotional and personal that we feel like it’s an undeserved honor to be considered a part of them. But we rarely get to genuinely thank you guys for what you’ve done for us. We could take pictures and write recipes until we went crazy, but if there was no one reading them, there wouldn’t be any point in it. Thank you for taking this wild ride with us, for letting us tell you our stories and for helping us re-discover who we are. I think I can speak for both of us when I say that this has been one of the greatest, most unexpected blessings in our lives in so many ways and we don’t have the words to thank you.

So I’ll try to do it with pie. Naughty, naughty pie that should only be eaten once a year.

You’ll need a packaged chocolate cookie crust (think a graham cracker crust, only made with Oreos), bananas, sweetened condensed milk, whipping cream, brown sugar, powdered sugar, cream cheese, and toffee chocolate bars (like Heath) or chocolate-covered toffee bits.

Using one can of sweetened condensed milk,

prepare the Dulce de Leche according to these directions.

Yes, I know this picture has two cans–although math was never my subject, I am a fairly competent counter. But I doubled the recipe for evil purposes.

When the Dulce de Leche has cooked, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool slightly. Spread it over the bottom and up the sides of the cookie crust.

If my Dulce de Leche looks a little…clumpy, that’s because it is. When you look at the instructions and they say that it takes about an hour for the Dulce de Leche to cook, it may not be in your best interest to use that hour to take a nap, even though you’re six months pregnant and tired and you were up half the night with allergy-ridden children. It’s okay. It was hidden under layers of awesomeness and still tasted fabulous.

Cut your bananas into 1/4″ slices and lay them on top of the Dulce de Leche…

Sprinkle about 1/2 cup of crushed chocolate toffee bits on top of the bananas and set it aside.

In a medium bowl with electric beaters, mix together the cream cheese and brown sugar until light and fluffy. In a large bowl, beat the whipping cream and powdered sugar together until medium peaks form. Add the cream cheese and mix until well-combined, light, and fluffy.

Gently spread the whipped cream mixture over the toffee bits and then sprinkle with the remaining 1/2 cup of toffee bits. Chill for several hours before serving.

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Edited to add: Apparently, everyone else in the world calls this Banoffee Pie. That’s what I get for living under a rock. 🙂