There were a few recipes I was tossing around in my head to make for this month’s Sugar High Friday(SHF), hosted by Ronald of loveSicily. Since the theme is coffee, I grabbed the opportunity to choose a recipe from my one and only coffee cookbook, Maxwell House Coffee Drinks & Desserts Cookbook (which is still available at Powerbooks, FYI). I had some macadamias in the fridge that I wanted to use so I zeroed in on the Coffee Macadamia Pie.

This pie is clearly similar to a pecan, or any other nut pie, though not as sticky. It calls for a cup of shredded coconut, which the book’s recipe testers added for “tropical flair.” It works for some people, but for me it tasted too much like biko, (Filipino glutinous rice cake cooked with coconut milk and sugar). Not bad, but not what I wanted from this pie.

Obviously, some tweaking was in order.

Because the coconut was overwhelming the coffee flavor, I decreased it to 1/4 cup, while upping the coffee powder to 2 tablespoons. These simple revisions worked wonders: now I had a lively macadamia pie echoing with coffee flavor. To continue the nut theme of my pie, I used a hazelnut crust since I’m partial to nut crusts, but of course you can use any kind of crust you like.

And no, my drink of choice for this pie wasn’t coffee, but tea. (wink)