I am not a food blogger. I love to cook and experiment with recipes found on other blogs. I love to tweak recipes so they sound better to me. But I don't usually create a recipe on my own. I had been really hungry for some sort of a pie that would still fall within my husband's Paleo diet standards. I started thinking about the Coconut Milk Whipped Cream from Marksdailyapple.com (that we love just on it's own), and decided to tweak it a little and layer it with some fruit in a crust. The result was amazing! Since a few people asked for my recipe, here you go. Crust:
I found the crust recipe on Stevepavlina.com within the recipe for Raw Fruit Pie (which also looked really good, but remember I had a picture in my head of what I was hungry for)2 cups raw nuts (I used about 1 1/4 cups almonds and 3/4 cups cashew pieces). Grind these in your food processor with the "S" blade until they are small crumbs.
1 cup pitted medjool dates
1/4 tsp salt
Add the dates and salt to the ground nuts in your food processor and whir until it's well blended and there aren't anymore large date pieces. Dump the crumbs into a 10"-11" round pan (I used my pampered chef deep dish round baker that I've had since the 90's, but a springform pan or even a really big pie pan would work.)
Press the crumbs out evenly across the bottom and up the sides, they tend to stick to your fingers so you could put some coconut oil on your hands to help. You need to press firmly so the crust packs together. Place the crust in the freezer for 15 minutes.
Filling:
The filling was primarily a tweaked version of the Coconut Whipped Cream I mentioned above from Marksdailyapple.com. (Just as an aside, Marksdailyapple.com is my husband's favorite Paleo site with the most consistently balanced information, if you're interested in more details about how to live paleo.)My tweaked version of Coconut Whipped Cream
2 cans full fat coconut milk that have been refrigerated for at least 24 hours (I personally like Thai Kitchen the best. It gives the creamiest texture and it's certified gluten free)
2 TBSP agave (most paleo adherents would say no to this, you can use raw honey instead or even go totally sweetener free if that's your thing)
1/2 tsp almond extract (which I'm sure wasn't sitting around during the paleolithic era so this probably isn't truly paleo but whatever)
Take your refrigerated coconut milk, flip it upside down and open both cans. Pour out the liquid portion of the milk and use it in some other recipe that calls for milk. That should leave you with two half cans of fairly solidified cream. Scrape those into your mixer bowl, add sweetener and extract and mix it (I use the whip attachment of my kitchenaid) for about 5 minutes. It should be the texture of nice whipped cream. Put this in the frig while you prep your fruit.
1 pint of fresh strawberries, sliced and unsweetened
2 bananas, sliced
1/2 cup fresh blueberries
Now, remove your crust from the freezer and evenly distribute your banana slices in the bottom of the crust.
Spread 1/2 of the coconut cream over this
Next, evenly distribute the sliced strawberries over the coconut cream
Spread the remaining half of the coconut cream over the strawberries
Sprinkle blueberries over the top
I then used my microplaner and grated 1 square of Trader Joe's Fair Trade Organic 72% Cacao Belgian Dark Chocolate Bar over the top of the whole pie.
Chill for at least an hour to help it set up.
That was about it.
