Peanut Butter Pie

Running up against my Sunday night pie deadline a couple of weeks ago, I once again found myself scrounging around the kitchen for pie ingredients. I have previously made several peanut butter-based pies, but wanted this one to be simple with the filling focused entirely on the peanut butter.

Somehow, despite my simplistic intentions, I nonetheless ended up with plenty of chocolate elements in this pie. I am not the chocoholic that many are. Perhaps my mind simply can not get past the indoctrination that chocolate and peanut butter belong together?

So, the final version of the pie was the standard crust, infused with cocoa powder (and some additional sugar). By infused, I mean that I dumped a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder in with the dry ingredients. I just thought that "infused" sounded very foodie of me. To finish the crust, I melted a quarter cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips and spread that concoction on the blind baked crust and allowed it to cool before pouring in the filling.

I made a basic cream filling, adding 1/2 cup of natural peanut butter near the end of the process. Here's a picture.

The most noteworthy aspects...

• You can see a partial discoloration of the filling in the above picture, near the edge of the pie. That was caused by my failure to make sure that the entire filling was covered with plastic wrap while it set up. That edge was exposed to some air, which caused a skin of sorts to form, and the color change
• The addition of cocoa powder caused the crust to become much more dense, hard, and less appetizing
• The two chocolate elements tended to overpower the peanut butter flavor. Several eaters noted this. If I had it to do over again (and I suppose that I do), I would focus entirely on the peanut butter and make a simple pastry or graham cracker crust.