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This is the perfect summertime pie. I know, we just entered Spring but this peanut butter pie from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking is everything you want in a summer dessert. The chocolate cookie crust is really simple (add to food processor and blitz), requires zero baking, then is covered by a thin layer of stabilized melted chocolate followed by a homemade no-churn peanut butter ice cream, both of which are also really easy. Freeze everything together overnight (minimally 4 hours if you're short on time), then take it out of the freezer about 10 minutes before serving. While it defrosts enough to slice, make the easy hot fudge sauce. Everything about Baked's peanut butter pie is uncomplicated, yet the end result is a stunning pie that tastes better than a Reese's peanut butter cup (which I love).
You start by pulsing 6 ounces of chocolate wafer cookies (this is about ⅔ a sleeve of the Nabisco-brand chocolate wafers, which are rather pricey) in a food processor until you have fine crumbs. If you spot any remaining chunks, break them up by hand and run the processor again. If you don't have one, you can place the wafers in a heavy-duty Ziploc and roll over them with a rolling pin, then use a wide-gauge sieve to catch any remaining pieces, but know that the food processor makes the process much faster. After you have cookie crumbs, stir in the sugar, then stir in the somewhat cooled melted butter. Press into a 9-inch pie plate (I tried doing this with a glass but the crust just stuck to the bottom of my glass so I used my hands). Chill while you make the chocolate layer.
I struggled with the thin chocolate layer, which should have been so easy. It's just melted semi-sweet chocolate with a little corn syrup to keep it smooth and shiny. I ran out of corn syrup, but have a giant tub of glucose syrup thanks to Christina Tosi's books, and I know that glucose syrup in the US has a slightly lower water content than light corn syrup, but the amount in the sauce was so small that I didn't add any extra water to my glucose syrup before adding it to the chocolate. As soon as I added the glucose syrup, my chocolate seized and became incredibly difficult to work with. I had to press it and smush it around to distribute it on the bottom of the cookie crust and I wound up picking on pieces of crust while moving the chocolate. Let that be a lesson to me... next time, adjust for water content.
From the recipe title, it wasn't clear to me that this is a no-churn ice cream pie, but that's exactly what the peanut butter filling is. You beat together 8 ounces room-temperature cream cheese (I used reduced fat), 132 grams creamy peanut butter (Skippy is my favorite), 150 grams brown sugar, and a sizeable two tablespoons of vanilla extract until smooth. In a separate deep bowl, you'll whip 1.5 cups heavy cream until soft peaks form. (Use a really deep bowl because otherwise you'll spatter yourself and your kitchen with cream. Which is what I did. Also note: for this step, it is ideal if you're lucky enough to also have a hand mixer, otherwise you'll need to transfer the peanut butter-cream cheese mixture to a clean bowl, then wash your mixing bowl and paddle attachment). Finally, you'll fold the whipped heavy cream into the peanut butter mixture. This process is a little laborious, and at first it's going to seem like the peanut butter will never fully incorporate into the whipped cream. Just keep believing, and it will eventually come together, I promise. Finally, after roughly 5-10 minutes, you'll have your no-churn peanut butter ice cream filling. Gently dollop this into the chilled pie crust, smooth out the top, then freeze for at least 4 hours. It's best for visual presentation of your pie if you're able to freeze it for the first hour without covering the top, so plastic wrap doesn't stick to the filling and cause any surface marring. However, for people who keep a really full freezer (like myself), it's totally fine to cover with plastic wrap immediately, because you'll be making an easy hot fudge sauce that's going to cover the surface anyhow.
Matt and Renato claim that the pie is great by itself but the hot fudge sauce takes it to the next level. Unless you are a hard core peanut butter fan, this pie needs the hot fudge sauce to balance out the peanut butter filling and to give it the full peanut butter cup-like flavor. Making the hot fudge sauce it a very minimally amount of work, and it's absolutely worth your time and some high-quality milk + dark chocolate. Just bring a cup of cream to a simmer, and while that's happening, weigh out your chocolate (I used Guittard chocolate chips - milk and extra dark). Add a ¼ cup of corn syrup to your simmered cream, and immediately pour it over the chocolate. Let the hot cream stand over the chocolate for 2 minutes, then stir in a single direction, starting from the center and moving outwards until smooth. This may also seem like it's never going to happen, but again, it will.
I was hesitant about how serving this pie would go, having made a frozen pie from a different Baked cookbook before and finding it tremendously challenging to serve. This pie wasn't the easy pie I've ever served, but it went better than expected. I brought it out of the freezer about 10-15 minutes before serving (after it had been frozen for roughly 20 hours) and gently microwave-reheated the hot fudge sauce I'd made ahead of time. It was easy to cut tiny slices of the softened but still frozen pie, however the bottom crust definitely stuck to the bottom of the pie plate. Happily, no one pays me to serve them dessert, so no one is allowed to complain about my presentation skills (which are lacking).
Somewhat surprisingly, especially after how much I didn't love the previous Baked frozen pie, I was a huge fan of this no-bake, no-churn peanut butter pie from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking and so were our friends and their kids. [If you don't like peanut butter however, the odds are tremendously in favor of you not appreciating this pie.] Once again, I strongly recommend that you keep this in your back pocket for summer time when you don't want to turn on your oven, but it's definitely worth making any time of year! It will impress everyone, and it takes only about an hour to prepare everything.
Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this peanut butter pie.
