Once upon a time I was a food blogger.
It was a blast and I loved (almost) every bit of baking, writing, photography and blogging I did.
The big focus on food blogging was the focus on gorgeous, beautiful photography. Each picture needed to be luscious and tantalizing.
Okay, so this key lime pie is an amazing dessert + it’s not that hard + you can make it 24 hours ahead of time + it’s great as a leftover + almost everyone loves it.
BUT these pictures may not be perfect.
The recipe IS! If you enjoy key lime pie and enjoy baking and do any sort of hosting, please try this recipe and excuse the not-so-perfect pictures. They are here to help guide and give a visual journey for the recipe.
I’ve made this recipe at least twenty times and it comes out the same every time. It’s a very consistently delicious recipe.
Note: In some of the books, Melody and her friends make lots of recipes, but in Gull Island Calamity, they solve this crazy beach murder mystery in practically a weekend. Phew. Not a lot of time for baking. So, we ended up with one amazing recipe in this book instead of several.
In the next book in the series, Autumn Adventure, there are several autumn recipes.
Enjoy!
Ingredients
1 pack of graham crackers, smashed (In the box I buy, there are three packs of grahams. I use one pack. It’s about one cup of smashed graham crackers).
2 Tbs. sugar
6 Tbs. melted butter
3 large egg yolks
1 can sweetened condensed milk
Some grated lime zest (optional. If you don’t have it, don’t stress!)
½ cup key lime juice
1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 Tbs. powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Put the graham crackers in a plastic zip lock bag. Use a rolling pin to smash the grahams. Microwave the butter (or melt it on the oven the old-fashioned way if you’d like), add it to the grahams. Add the 2 Tbs. sugar and mix it up.
It will look like a crumbly mix just like this.
Put the crust in a pie pan. If you’ve given away all your pie pans, a 8×8 works fine too. No need to put any sort anti-stick spray on.
Bake the crust for 5 minutes.
While the crust is baking, beat 3 egg yolks in a mixing bowl. Add the condensed milk and whisk. Add the key lime juice. If you’re using zest, add it in now.
The mixture will be thick, slightly yellow with speckles of green (the zest).
I usually try to do this part quickly, so as soon as the crust come out of the oven, I pour in the filling, then put the pie back in the oven.
Bake for 15 minutes. The pie will be set and the crust will be golden brown.
Remove from the oven and let cool for at least twenty minutes. Put in the oven and chill for (at least) two hours.
When you’re ready to serve the pie, beat the whip cream, adding in the powdered sugar and the vanilla. The entire pint of whipping cream is not needed. I use the excess to put in my coffee the next morning!
It’s so pretty and so easy.
And, this was going to be the pretty picture of a perfect piece of key lime pie! Then it fell. After that it fell again when I tried to fix it. Argh.
Oh well. I guess I won’t be going to be a food blogger. But I’ll be making this pie again and bringing it to my next summer gathering.
If you’d like to check out a free preview of Gull Island Calamity, check out this post.
