PB&J Pie

Last week, The Food Snob made a peanut butter pie for her coworker's birthday. Her coworker's birthday just happened to be four days before my birthday, and I just happened to be looking for a birthday cake alternative. I love cake, but five days of pokeball cake wears down even the most cocoaphilic of taste buds.

Mo Diva modified her recipe from the one on a jar of Smucker's fudge topping to use a homemade crust, real cream and Reeses candies. I had to un-modify my version back to using store-bought whipped topping to keep it lactose-free, and used a store-bought crust because, well, I'm lazy. And it was my birthday, so I was allowed to be. It was bad enough to spend my birthday morning with she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security, but I digress.

I located the original recipe, replete with product promotions galore, here on the Smucker's site. It had quite a bit of chocolate (and sugar) in it, of which I had my fill, so I devised a strawberry topping instead to turn it into a PB&J pie. For the record, fruit makes it healthy.

For the pie
-1 cup creamy peanut butter
-1 (8 oz.) container Tofutti Better-than-Cream-Cheese
-1/4 cup sugar
-3/4 container of dairy-free whipped topping
-1 prepared graham cracker crust

For the topping
-16 oz. fresh or frozen strawberries
-1/4 cup sugar

I was supposed to use my new electric mixer to make the pie filling, but I didn't feel like taking it out and cleaning it afterwards. Fortunately, Tofutti is really easy to cream by hand. I mixed together the peanut butter, "cream cheese", and sugar, then folded in the whipped topping to make a fluffy, sticky mass. I heaped it in the crust and stuck it in the fridge to set up.


For the topping, I put the strawberries and sugar in a small pot and boiled it down into a slightly chunky sauce.



There was a minor crisis when the sauce boiled over and burned instantly on the range...apparently one should never leave cooking fruits unattended. I put the topping in a jar in the fridge while waiting for the pie to finish (I didn't pour it directly over the filling, because it would make cutting even messier than usual).

After many hours, I wrangled the first slice out of the pan and topped it with the refrigerated topping.


After a full 24 hours, it cuts a lot cleaner than it looks here. The peanut butter flavor mellows out with time, so I've become much more conservative with the strawberry topping. The crust I bought from the store is really crumbly, but it's just a vehicle for the filling anyway. I am seriously considering making this filling with a little more cream cheese and a little less Cool Whip to put on bagels instead of in pies...then I don't need a special occasion to eat it :D