A Taste of Florida

For a friend's birthday, I made a homemade key lime pie with a chocolate almond crust.  I don't normally eat much key lime pie, and this was actually the first one I had ever made.  The impetus for this decision was a request from the birthday boy.  Luckily, hubby also likes key lime pie, so this was good practice and a good recipe to know. While I was determined to make it from scratch, with a few added shortcuts this recipe could be an easy but impressive dessert.

All of the ingredients... yes, those are two bags of key limes for one pie.

The recipe starts with the crust.  Chocolate graham crackers provide the chocolate and are easily blended in a food processor along with the other crust ingredients.  Then the blended ingredients are pressed into the pie pan and baked.  That was fairly easy and could be replaced by a store bought graham cracker crust for a quicker version.  Where the works really came in was juicining all the key limes... two whole pounds!  This is where the most time can be saved if you buy key lime (or just lime) juice.  Once the lime juice is procured, it is mixed with the rest of the ingredients (basically sweetened condensed milk which seems to do much of the heavy lifting in the recipe).  You put the pie in the oven again and then refrigerate.  It is so simple, especially if you were do used a store bought crust and lime juice.  This is definitely going on my dessert rotation.

Key limes are itty bitty and took quite some time to squeeze.

 Voila!  It doesn't look really impressive from this picture, but it tasted delicious... sweet and tart as a key lime pie should be.