Sandcastle Pie

Sandcastle Pie

Sand

• Box of Nilla wafers
• 4 Oreos
• Cube of melted butter

Crush cookies in Ziploc bag with rolling pin.  Mix in bowl with the butter.

Pie Filling

• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup corn starch
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups milk
• 4 egg yolks, slightly beaten
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Mix sugar, cornstarch and salt in saucepan.  Gradually stir in milk.  Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils.  Boil and stir 1 minute.  Stir part of hot mixture gradually into egg yolks.  Stir egg mixture into saucepan.  Boil and stir 1 minute.  Remove from heat.  Stir in butter and vanilla.  Press plastic wrap immediately onto filling to prevent a thickened layer from forming while it cools.  Refrigerate until room temp.

Chocolate Glaze

• Bag of Nestle Tollhouse semisweet chocolate chips
• Half a cube of butter
• 2 Tablespoons honey
• 3 Tablespoons coffee

Microwave chocolate and butter in glass bowl for 30 seconds at a time, stirring until melted.  Add honey and coffee.  Stir until smooth.  Let cool.

Assembly

Wash and dry sand bucket.  Put a layer of crumb mixture in bottom.  Then add half of pudding.  Put a layer of chocolate, then a layer of crumb mixture.  Then add the rest of the pudding, followed by more chocolate and more of the crumb mixture.  (There may be leftover chocolate glaze which is good on graham crackers!)  Saving a little crumb mixture, mix with a dollop of chocolate and form into sandcastles.  (I used a clean dosing cup leftover from cough medicine package.)

Be creative!

You can do fun things with what you have on hand like I did. 

• I put 3 indents each in 3 malt balls to make coconuts. 
• I used a piece of a gummy worm and cut it to make the starfish.
• My beach ball is obviously... a peppermint.
• And I searched my garden to find a plant that looked like a palm tree and found the lupine.