I made a key lime pie for a little get-together we had last week. Sometimes I decide that I need to make a particular pie and no matter how much browsing other desserts I do, that particular pie sticks with me. That was key lime pie last week. I had decided to make it, and I looked at a few different recipes and ended up going with the one from Sally’s Baking Addiction. Two things that won me over were, 1) it had a whole cup of lime juice in the filling. Since I’m a firm believer in citrus desserts that are really citrusy, that was a plus. 2) The graham cracker crust had macadamia nuts in it, which was very intriguing me.
This is the first crumb crust I’ve made in a while. The advantage of crumb crusts is that they are faster than pie dough, although I find getting them firmly pressed in to the pan to be a real hassle, but some practice would probably solve that problem. The graham cracker/macadamia nut combo was so good! Like, “stand in the kitchen and eat the leftovers out of a bowl” good.
Anyway, key lime pie is easy to make and delicious. Key limes are hit and miss in southern California. I see them occasionally, but you can’t count on finding them, so I used a combination of Persian limes and bottled key lime juice. You may want to judge me, but just know that Nellie and Joe’s Famous Key West Lime Juice is excellent, and in retrospect, I probably could have saved myself the trouble of squeezing a bunch of limes.
And then in the world’s silliest dilemma, I spent a couple of days debating whether I should pipe whipped cream on top or just scoop it on. Ultimately I decided to just scoop it on top. I think the big pile of whipped cream is pretty! Lastly, I just grated some lime zest on top.
While I did make Sally’s recipe pretty closely to as-written, I did a bit of tinkering.
When I told my husband I was making key lime pie, his response was that it wasn’t his favorite because he found it too sweet. In order to try to combat that, the first thing I did was cut back on the sugar in the crust. While the recipe only calls for two tablespoons of sugar, graham crackers are pretty sweet, so I just put one teaspoon in. As I said previously, the crust was delicious, no complaints, and I suspect that I would have found it too sweet if I had used as much sugar as the recipe had called for.
Second, in the filling, I did use two cans of sweetened condensed milk. but I didn’t make an effort to scrape the cans completely clean. I don’t know that this made a meaningful difference in the sweetness.
Lastly, I didn’t sweeten my whipped cream. Instead of plain whipped cream, I made Erin McDowell’s extra creamy whipped cream, which has some cream cheese in it. This has the added benefit of stabilizing the whipped cream so it will last longer. It also just tastes really good.
I thought this was a really well balanced pie - a little sweet, tart and creamy. I was very happy with the result!
That sounds really good!! Did it end up getting two thumbs up from the hubby??