Vegan banana cream pie with toasted coconutty crust

Being away from my family during Thanksgiving was particularly hard. I decided, in order to make it a little more bearable for all of us, to embark on a recipe hunt that I thought would be impossibly simple to find, maybe a little harder to make. I was wrong. I have a cashew allergy, so the wonder that apparently is cashew cream will not be mine, and most of the recipes I found involved cashews in some way or another.

Mine doesn't.

I tried adapting a couple of recipes for banana pudding, but it just wasn't doing it. The resulting creations were edible but not really the essence of banana cream pie. I hit on one that was almost there, but the filling was just a little too tart, and the whole pie was the absolute wrong color for banana cream. I wanted something almost white, evocative of fresh bananas - not brown. Brown pie and the word banana just start everything off on the wrong foot.

So, here's what I've got! This banana-rich concoction elicited cries of "Yum!" from all three family members who were allowed to taste the filling.

Totally vegan, and NO cashews!

Ingredients:

Crust
2 cups sweetened coconut flakes
1 cup unbleached, all-purpose flour
1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
Dash salt
5 tablespoons coconut oil, melted.

Filling
5 bananas
1 package (12.3 oz, 439 grams) firm silken tofu, preferably chilled
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup safflower oil

Instructions for the crust:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Spray or otherwise oil a 9-inch pie plate.
Mix all dry ingredients together well, pour the coconut oil over and mix with fork until thoroughly moistened.
Press coconut mixture into pie plate, using the back of a fork to get it up on the sides. This is the most time-consuming part of the entire recipe, but it's still not much.
Bake for 10-15 minutes, until lightly browned, then let cool completely. The crust will become crispier when it is cool.

For filling:

Slice 1 1/2 of the bananas into thin slices and then spread them over the completely cooled crust, propping some along the sides. You do not want your crust warm at all. Cooked bananas = bleh.

Like this.

Put the remainder of the bananas and all the other ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. Pour the filling over the bananas in the crust, then give the blender and a spatula to someone you like a lot to clean.

Chill several hours until time to serve. If you're really feeling festive, some vegan whip would make a nice topping.