The thing about Banoffee Pie is that it shouldn't work as well as it does. I've thought about this a lot, probably too much if I'm being honest, which I am being, because this is a food blog and honesty about food is the only kind that matters. The first time I encountered it, I was genuinely skeptical. I was seven, at my sister Dana's house for the hottest August on record in 2001, and I was the kind of seven-year-old who had very strong opinions about what I would and wouldn't eat, most of which were wrong. I sat down at the table with the specific energy of someone who has already decided they won't like something, which is the worst possible way to sit down at any table, and especially at my sister Dana's table, where the food was always trying to teach you something about being wrong. I looked at the plate. I looked at my sister Dana. my sister Dana looked back at me with an expression that said, very clearly, that she had made this dish for forty years and was not concerned about the opinions of someone who had existed for seven of them.
I want to tell you about the dinner party where Banoffee Pie nearly ended a friendship. The year was 2001. I had, in a moment of catastrophic overconfidence, told everyone I was bringing my specialty. My specialty was, at that point in my life, toast and the ability to order pizza. I had eaten Banoffee Pie once. I had watched it being made once, from across a kitchen, while I was also talking to someone else. Based on these qualifications, I announced that I would make it for twelve people. My friend neighbor Todd offered, twice, to help. I declined, twice, with the breezy confidence of someone who has not yet understood the difference between watching someone do something and knowing how to do it. What arrived at that dinner party could be described as an interpretation. A loose interpretation. An interpretation made by someone who understood the general concept but had perhaps misread several key supporting documents.
Here is the problem with Banoffee Pie: once you have eaten a truly excellent version, you cannot eat a mediocre version without grief. The mediocre version isn't bad. It's perfectly fine. It will nourish you and taste like what it is. But you will eat it while holding, somewhere in the back of your mind, the memory of the excellent version, and the excellent version will make the mediocre version feel like a translation, technically accurate, missing the music. This is a curse and also a gift, because it means you are always, on some level, looking.
I got so lost in the story (which is the problem; the story is so good, it always does this to me) that I looked up and I was three hundred words past where the recipe was supposed to start and I had, somehow, still not gotten there. The recipe. Which is the point of this website. The point of this page. The thing that the title of this website is literally about having forgotten. I have forgotten the recipe. Not entirely; I remember the shape of it, the general direction, the feeling of it in my hands when I make it. But the specifics, the written version, the list that would help you in your kitchen: that I apparently cannot access right now. Check back. I'll find it. I always find it eventually.