Banana Butterscotch Cream Pie

Happy National Pretzel Day! A while back (like a couple years), I had stumbled on a website that listed food holidays. I was tempted to try and make a recipe for each of the holidays, but let's face it, that takes some serious time, planning and money to try and make something every day. I made a few things here and there. Well, as I was looking back through my blog I had seen that April is National Grilled Cheese month. I got a little inspired to look back at that site and see what other days were coming up. A few recent ones I realized were easy foods that I had tons of recipes for. I even had a couple where I had everything I needed except for a couple of things. Since I'm on vacation this week, I figured why not try and make some fun food for it's national holiday. The first was the Mini Cherry Cheesecakes. I stocked up on cream cheese a while back when it was on sale just waiting for the perfect cheesecake recipe to come up. Well this wasn't exactly the cheesecake I was waiting for, but the holiday came up and I knew I had the ingredients for mini cheesecakes, so it worked out.
Same with pretzels. OK, well not really the same. I had the graham crackers and pudding, but I did have to buy the pretzels, bananas and Cool Whip.

You can't go wrong with a cream pie. It's basically pudding in a pie shell topped with Cool Whip. It's the easiest of all pies (in my opinion) and the most demanded in my family. Well, at least my mum's chocolate cream pies are. I get a little anxious when I look at "real" pie recipes. The thought of making dough from scratch freaks me out. I am not a dough person. Making a graham cracker crust from scratch is no problem. Add some pretzels to that crust and you're getting fancy! The pretzels add a nice saltiness to the sweetness of this pie. They also add a great texture to the crust since the crumbs weren't as small as the graham cracker crumbs. This pie is great, but my recommendation is bigger. Add a thicker layer of bananas, and maybe double the pudding. It ends up a little on the thin end when made the way described below. I just placed 3 full graham crackers in a Ziploc and smashed them with the flat side of my meat tenderizer. Same with the pretzels. I threw a few pretzel rods into a bag and smashed them into crumbs. Making about a cup of each crumb.

Banana Butterscotch Cream Pie
adapted from the Jell-O Butterscotch Pudding Box

1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 cup pretzel crumbs
6 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
2 tbsp. sugar
1 box Butterscotch Pudding mix
2 cups cold milk
2 bananas
1 container whipped topping

1. Preheat oven to 350. Combine crumbs, butter and sugar in a bowl and mix until moist. Press into a 9-inch pie plate and up the sides. Bake for 10 minutes and let cool.
2. In a medium saucepan, mix the milk and pudding mix and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. remove from heat.
3. Slice the bananas and layer over the bottom of the crust. I drizzled mine with some caramel sauce.
4. Pour the pudding mix over the bananas and refrigerate at least 4 hours until set. Topped with whipped topping and serve!

You could also put some chocolate ganache on the crust under the bananas as well for another variation.