This is not typically a travel blog. Nor is it typically a baking one.
But congratulations if you got here from google! I’m an American science fiction writer who is currently backpacking in New Zealand. It’s a beautiful country and two of my roommates have brought home a lot of kiwi fruit. They just finished working at a packhouse for it, so I do mean A LOT of kiwifruit. Mostly golden.
We have three bins of it in the room while I type this. Each bin has at least three layers. So, again, A LOT of kiwifruit. This means that I decided to try something a bit different: baking kiwi pie.
But, how? That’s a good question.
I searched google and I asked around. I did get some interesting suggestions (like using it to top custard pie), but I ultimately decided to make my own recipe. It’s a combination of a gram cracker crust (tea biscuit edition), an apple juice variation of key lime pie, and cut golden kiwi fruit for the topping. I used apple since I don’t particularly like lime and I thought that it would go well with the kiwifruit.
The verdict? One of my roommates thinks it should be called a tart, I have now learned several variants for the word ‘awesome’ in Japanese, and everyone enjoyed it. I personally loved it so much I made it again. And I documented it a bit better this time:
Ingredients:
~200 grams crumbled chocolate tea biscuits. Personally, I got the countdown choc creams and removed the chocolate cream part (since then I could nibble on that while baking). If you do what I did you’ll need two packs of them.
1/3 cup sugar
~75+ grams butter, soon to be melted
1 can sweetened condensed milk. I couldn’t find any, so I made my own. You can find the recipe I used [here]. One can is (I think) roughly 3/4 cup homemade.
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup apple juice
~5 or 6 golden kiwi fruit
Directions:
- Crumble the tea biscuits and mix with sugar in a bowl. This will become the pie crust. When ready, start preheating the oven at 180 Celsius (regular baking, not fan forced).
- Melt the butter and mix it with the sugar / biscuit mixture. It’s listed as ~75 grams since the mixture needs to stick together enough to form a crust (but not so much that it becomes unworkable).
- Prepare your muffin pan. I used a very light layer of cooking oil to try to prevent the crusts from sticking.
- Press the crust into the muffin pan in the shapes of mini pie crusts. This means that the crusts should also come up around the sides (see above), and not just be on the bottom.
- Bake the crust in the oven for 6 minutes
- Make the filling by combining the sweetened condensed milk, egg yolk, and apple juice. Mix it quickly for about 2-3 minutes so it can thicken. I personally borrowed someone’s stick mixer for this, but you can probably whisk it.
- When the crust is ready, remove it from the oven. Add the filling evenly to each mini pies. Carefully return the pies to the oven and bake for another 15 minutes.
- When done, the mini pies will need to cool. When ready, put them in the fridge for 1-2 hours.
- Remove from fridge and add cut golden kiwi pieces. Enjoy! 🙂
