It was Pi Day on Sunday and I took that as an excuse to make some desserts. Mostly, I took it as an excuse to try the new Banana Fruit Spread from Trader Joe’s. This stuff seems to be very polarizing. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it, myself. You see, outside of foster, I don’t like actual bananas (it’s the texture), but I do really like banana flavored things. I figured it was at least worth a try and there was no better way to try it than by incorporating it into a hand pie.
I suppose this isn’t technically a pie since I didn’t use pie dough, but I wanted to mix things up. I cut one sheet of puff pastry into 8 equal rectangles. In the middle of each square I plopped about 1 tbsp of nutella and 1 tsp of banana fruit spread. I brushed an egg wash (1 egg + 1 tbsp water, beaten) over the edges, folded over, sealed it, and baked at 400 for about 17 minutes. There’s so much butter in puff pastry you won’t even need to grease the cookie sheet. These will pop right off.
Chocolate and banana are a pretty obvious pairing, but I thought these two ingredients meshed particularly well together. This is certainly an instance where fruit spread (aka jam) form really works hard for ya. It’s the right texture, which means the flavors blend perfectly.
These are perfect grab-and-go type desserts. And thanks to lots of help from the store in the form of pre-packaged ingredients, they’re super simple to make. You can see from the cross-section above that these are nicely filled and so flaky. We ate two and then brought the rest to friends and I’m kinda regretting not saving some more for myself…
Peaches to Apples 