For Christmas this past year I had it all planned to make a new chocolate dessert recipe. We were going to my daughter’s home three hours away and I wanted to pick something I could make before we left home on Christmas Eve and it would travel well.
A day before I was to make the dessert my daughter said she’d really love to have a coconut cream pie. She already planned a chocolate fondue and wanted something she hadn’t had in a long time.
This meant I had to make it at her house. I’d done the recipe a great many times before so I got out my trusty recipe, made my pastry crust dough and packed all my containers of ingredients to put the pie together at her house. She doesn’t bake and I measure everything out in little containers when I go there to bake something.
But, I was disappointed in the filling I made. Everyone else loved it but I thought it was too sweet and tasted too much of the corn starch I used to thicken the filling. I needed to perfect that recipe so it was smoother, creamier and had more coconut flavor. I replaced some of the corn starch as a thickener with another egg yolk and changed out regular milk for coconut milk. I also reduced the sugar. This resulted in a Coconut Pastry Filling that was very nice and well balanced with flavor and sweetness.
You can put this in Tartlet Shells, a pre-baked Pastry Crust or even Cream Puffs. It would make a good cupcake or cake filling also.