This week's Baked Sunday Mornings recipe, a Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust and Easy Fudge Sauce, is surprisingly simple. It's a no-bake frozen pie and you can put it together (including the sauce) in only a few minutes. The crust is a mixture of ground chocolate wafers (I used Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers), sugar, and melted butter. You're supposed to press the crust into a pie pan, but I used a cheesecake pan with a loose bottom to make it easier to serve. You chill the crust while you melt some semisweet chocolate and add a bit of corn syrup; you spread the chocolate over the bottom of the crust and put it back in the fridge. The filling is a mixture of creamy peanut butter, softened cream cheese, dark brown sugar, and vanilla, with heavy cream beaten to soft peaks folded in. I decided to put the filling in a pastry bag and pipe it into the crust; I piled it higher in the middle because I figured that would mimic the shape of a pie in a traditional pie pan. I put the finished pie in the freezer overnight.
The following day I made the easy fudge sauce, which is a mixture of milk chocolate, dark chocolate, corn syrup, and heavy cream. I put it in the fridge until I was ready to serve the pie, when I reheated the sauce briefly in a pan on the stove to get it back to pouring consistency.
The pie was easy to release from the pan in one piece; the white band on the crust in the photo above is just some ice crystals. The pie was a little difficult to cut -- the crust was pretty hard. I think it would be pretty difficult to slice this dessert if you made it in a pie pan, unless you pulled the whole pie out of the pan and put it on a cutting board first.
The pie filling had a nice creamy consistency that was rich but not heavy. I thought that it could have used a pinch of salt to heighten the flavor. My favorite part was the crust, or more specifically, the thin layer of chocolate on the crust, which had a satisfying snap. Because the crust was so hard, it was challenging to cut off pieces of pie with a fork. At some point I gave up and picked up my piece of pie and ate it as a hand food. In retrospect, it probably would have made more sense to wait 10 or 15 minutes before eating the pie, instead of eating it straight out of the freezer. The chocolate sauce was good (and it's certainly easy), but it wasn't particularly memorable. But overall, this was a very good dessert for very little effort. We served it to some friends we hosted for dinner, and they loved it and happily took home the leftovers for their kids.
Recipe: "Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust and Easy Fudge Sauce" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
The pie was easy to release from the pan in one piece; the white band on the crust in the photo above is just some ice crystals. The pie was a little difficult to cut -- the crust was pretty hard. I think it would be pretty difficult to slice this dessert if you made it in a pie pan, unless you pulled the whole pie out of the pan and put it on a cutting board first.
Recipe: "Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust and Easy Fudge Sauce" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
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