Key Lime Pie

As the weather heats up, I look towards cool, refreshing summer favorites. Although you need to bake (or microwave!) a graham cracker crust, 10 minutes of a hot oven on a sticky summer day is worth the result:

The trick to a good key lime pie is well beaten egg yolks. Here are my yolks, dusted with lime zest, ready to be beaten:

In the process, the yolks fade to pale yellow and get noticably thicker:

The next step is to add sweetened condensed milk:

And the final step? The challenge of waiting a few hours while the filling sets in the fridge!

Black Bottom Pie

When I was little, we frequented a restaurant called The Pie Plate. I loved to get pies topped with as much meringue as possible, but my mom's favorite was Black Bottom Pie:
The pie consists of a graham cracker crust spread with a layer of chocolate and filled with a vanilla custard.

The first step was smashing up graham crackers...

and blending together nuts with some flour, sugar and spice:

I mixed these together and added melted butter to make the crust:

Once the crust was baked, I made my chocolate layer - in this case, a chocolate ganache:

While that hardened in the crust, I put together the first part of my custard filling, a pastry cream that consisted of milk, cornstarch, sugar, vanilla and butter, whisked in after the cream is cooked:

Once the pastry cream and the chocolate were well cooled, I whipped some  heavy cream to lighten the texture of the chilled pastry cream:

And once those ingredients were combined, I poured the filling into the crust and tried to muster the patience to wait a full three hours for the filling to set!