We turned deviled eggs into "brown-eyed girls" by putting a sliced black olive on top. I added paprika to mini raviolis and called them volcanoes. We had a tropical fruit plate, and a veggie platter we called "parrot food" and served with hummus. I scoured Jimmy Buffett lyrics for food references and came up with "half-baked" cookies, as well as Junior Mints and Juicy Fruit for cute table garnishes. And I randomly decided to google a coconut tart recipe and found this little gem on one of the many recipe sites around the internet. The original recipe is for a pie, but I like to serve finger food at parties so I put my mini muffin pan to work, yet again.
4 pie crusts
1 17oz can grated coconut
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
2 tsps lemon juice
3 beaten eggs
1 tsp vanilla
Use a 2" biscuit cutter to cut your pie crust into mini pie crusts, them ball up the leftover pie crust, roll it back out, and cut again until you've used pretty much all of it.
You could use a glass if you don't have biscuit cutters. Like I said, the original recipe is for ONE pie, but I used FOUR pie crusts, so the crust to filling ratio is quite different doing it this way. You could roll out the pie crust first to flatten it out a little more if you want your crust to go a long way.
Grease your mini-muffin tin and put one miniature pie crust in each spot, pushing down in the middle so you have a little bowl in which to pour your filling.
Then all you have to do for the filling is beat the eggs and combine all the ingredients. Super easy. Pour the mix into your mini pie shells and bake at 350. The original recipe says 40 minutes, but remember that's for a pie, so these will not take that long. Mine took about 25 minutes. Just keep an eye on them and when the crust looks done, your filling should be about done too. They were a little gooey in the middle (yum) but having cooked for 25 minutes, I wasn't worried about the eggs being underdone.
These were a HIT.
