Baked Sunday Mornings: Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie

I was pretty optimistic about this week's recipe for Baked Sunday Mornings, "Peanut Butter and Banana Cream Pie."  I often have problems making fruit pies (see, e.g., here and here), but a cookie crust filled with pudding, bananas, and peanut butter cream should be pretty easy.

The crust for this pie is made from vanilla wafers, sugar, and cold butter ground together in a food processor, pressed into a pan, and then baked until golden brown. (The recipe includes a note that the crust comes out best when the pie is made in a glass pie plate, so that's what I used.) I found that I had a lot of crust mixture; I didn't use it all, because I didn't want the crust to be too thick. You fill the cooled crust with vanilla pudding (sugar, cornstarch, salt, heavy cream, milk, egg yolks, vanilla bean seeds, and butter), add a layer of sliced bananas tossed in orange juice, and then finish off the pie with a peanut butter topping (cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, peanut butter, and whipped cream). The recommended garnish is chocolate-covered peanuts and more sliced bananas.

I didn't have any chocolate-covered peanuts, and so I garnished my pie with a ring of Sweetriot dark chocolate-covered cacao nibs instead.  I skipped the additional slices of banana on top. I refrigerated the pie overnight before cutting into it, and I immediately noticed a problem with the pudding. It was loose and had not set properly. When I made the pudding on the stove, it thickened and I had every reason to believe that it would firm up to the proper texture after being chilled. But when I cut into the pie, pudding was spilling out and creating a big mess (I was able to get out one tidy slice for the photo above).

The loose pudding problem was bad enough that I decided the pie wasn't suitable to serve to anyone else. Nonetheless, it was pretty tasty. The bottom half of this pie is basically just a banana pudding -- vanilla wafers, vanilla pudding, and bananas. (It's not as good as the banana pudding from DamGoodSweet I made recently, but it's up there.) I'm a bit ambivalent about the peanut butter layer. When I took my first bite of pie, I thought that the peanut butter flavor was too subtle (there is only one-third cup of creamy peanut butter in the topping); it left me wanting more. However, I noticed that the peanut butter flavor seemed to intensify over time. By day three after baking, I thought that the flavor of the peanut butter topping was perfect. That said, I am not a huge fan of peanut butter and banana together, and I think I would have actually preferred this pie with straight whipped cream on top. I also think this pie needed more banana flavor, so my bad for not adding more bananas on top.

I assume the problem with the pudding texture was probably my fault. This recipe is available on epicurious.com and the vast majority of reviews don't mention any problem with the pudding consistency. All in all, I didn't love the pie, but I enjoyed eating my messy slices.

Recipe: "Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie," from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. Recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings, or here on epicurious.com.

Previous Posts:

• "DamGood Indeed: Banana Pudding with Vanilla Wafer Crumble," February 23, 2012.
• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Coffee Ice Cream (and Tart!)," August 28, 2011.
• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Peaches and Dream Pie," July 17, 2011.
• "Just Half a Slice Please... the Top Half!: Buttermilk Pie," July 12, 2011.
• "Baked Sunday Mornings: Blackberry Pie," July 3, 2011.