Banoffee pie

Well, I have been asked a few times how to produce the Banoffee pie. So, this is how. Though, I am not transforming this into a cooking blog as there is so much good stuff out there. Just check the Grilled Cheese Social, the Pioneer Woman, Saveur and of course BBC (look for Sophie Dahl and Lorraine Pascale). Mainly, this will be about substituting ingredients with stuff that is available in Germany.
For a quite substantial 28cm cake that will serve ten hungry people (or something between 12 and 14 normal people), you'll need:

• Chocolate Hobnobs, which are not available and substituted by one package of wholemeal biscuits (like Leibniz or De Beukelaer)
• A 100g chocolate bar (like something that wasn't sure whether to become milk or dark chocolate)
• About 1.5oz (some 50g) butter
• A tsp baking powder
• Two 14oz (397g) tins of sweetened condensed milk, I'd say Carnation, but in Germany you'll find Dogvan or Steinhauer products. The pre-caramalised stuff is fine and saves you a lot of time. If you can choose, the Steinhauer stuff is a bit more caramelised and more solid making the cake less likely to "melt" away.
• Six medium sized bananas (but since that's the healthy part, you can have six large ones with no probs)
• A big containter double cream (16oz/450g), which is not available in Germany. But there are two options. If you're lucky your supermarket offers "Crème double". There is only one supplier in Germany who lives in Bielefeld and and for some reason they believe it was sort of Crème fraiche (Can you believe it?). Second option is Amazon. They offer a 1l (aka 35 Imperial oz) package of Frischli Creme Double. You'll need four thimble sized packs of Dr Oetker or half a Frischli package.
• Finally, some cocoa for dusting

Once you've got all that stuff together, you've been to a number of shops and assistants will have looked at you as if you were alien. Dare you. Asking for double cream.

The toffee: For starting with the stuff that takes longest, you put the tins with the condensed milk in a saucepan and fill it up with water. You make it boil and leave it there for almost 2 hrs. Take care, the tins have to be covered by water at all times. Otherwise, there is a certain risk of the stuff exploding. Also, you might want to use an old-ish saucepan as something leaves some horrible stains on a stainless steel one. The tins will increase in size over time and they will be piping hot at the end of the process. So, you'll need something to get them out of the water. Maybe place them in the sink for a moment and get some cold water. This will caramelise the condensed milk. If you have the pre-caramelised stuff, you don't have to do that and you save almost two hours. Also, this is already cold and you don't have to wait.

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The pie: Whilst your toffee is boiling, you crush the biscuits. This should be sort of fine crumbles at the end of the process. You add those crumbles, some 1/3 of your chocolate bar finely chopped, the baking powder and the molten butter in a bowl. Mix it nicely. You want to press this in your cake tin such that it is packed and evenly spread out. You put that in the fridge and let it sit.

The banoffee layers: Chop all the bananas and lay half them on your pie. Again, this should be evenly spread out. Then you are careful with opening your first toffee tin. If something squirts out of there on your hand, put it under running cold water right now. Try to spread this toffee evenly (it can be quite thick and sticky and refuse to do so. But it's fine if it's not perfect - we gonna cover this with cream later). Put in the next layer of chopped banana on top of this toffee layer. The remainder of the chocolate should be molten by now (have I told you to put in a bowl and melt it?) and you use a spoon for sort of sprinkling the chocolate it all over the place (but within the boundaries of your tin). The idea is that once the chocolate becomes solid again it provides sort of a grid for stabilising the thing. As a side effect it tastes like a bit of extra chocolate. Finally, you aim for spreading the toffee from the second tin sort of evenly.

The cream: So, this is the double cream. Now, the toffee stuff is all warm and putting whipped cream on warm stuff is not a good idea. So let it sit, put the cake in the fridge until you are like serving it. It's only 5 mins from now. You put the double cream in a bowl and start whipping it, just way more gently than German so-called cream. The cream becomes stiff and fluffy faster than German whipping cream and if you're doing too much it'll turn into butter rather quickly. So give it a gentle whipping. Spread the whipped cream evenly all over the cake. Now this time you actually try to get it nicely evenly spread. Just in case there is some cream left, you might want to do some creamy decoration or just taste whether it's nice and fluffy (though too late for making amendments now). Finally, dust some cocoa powder all over.