fourth of july & coconut pie

The 4th of July has never really been much of a holiday for me. Fireworks, eating, parades and what not. Not much to it if you ask me. I instead spent the holiday in the movie theater, watching “Hancock”, which I enjoyed. Not as much as I enjoyed “Wall-E”, but I still liked it. I also ventured out to the park near my house with Maya in tow to watch fireworks. I let her run around in the grass, which she enjoyed far more than the fireworks.

Today I got the desire to make a dessert. I had been wanting to make something coconut-y for awhile now and I decided today was the day to make a coconut pie.

I can’t pie crust for the life of me. I’ve tried, it seems to never turn out right. I even managed to mess this premade pie shell up a little bit – I baked it off with no pie weights (since I don’t have any) or any beans in it (I just plain old forgot) and the bottom of the crust puffed up while baking, showing me exactly why you need pie weights. The outer edge shrunk down on the sides and pulled the whole edge down. Oh well. Lesson learned.

I used this Old Fashioned Coconut Cream Pie recipe I spotted on Allrecipes.com, with a few adjustments after reading the reviews. I used half coconut milk and cornstarch instead of flour. I used 3/4 cup of toasted coconut and 1/4 cup untoasted just to play around with the textures a bit. I think it turned out quite well. If I wasn’t feeling lazy, I could have made my own whipped cream as well. But Cool Whip saves the day again. I would maybe go a little easier on the toasted coconut on top next time, but I wanted to use the rest of the coconut I had toasted and went a little crazy.