Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Every time I consider making something with peanut butter in it, I think of my step-daughter who loves the stuff. And you really can’t get much simpler than this no-bake frozen concoction. In fact, you could leave off the crust and just eat the filling as a frozen mousse.

So Cho, this one is for you.

You start off by making an easy chocolate cookie crust held together by a bit of butter. This crumb mixture gets pressed into a pie pan and left to solidify in the fridge while you make the filling.

The filling is simply cream cheese, smooth peanut butter, vanilla, brown sugar and cream. The cream cheese, peanut butter and sugar are mixed together until smooth. Then you whip the cream to soft peaks and fold it into the peanut butter mixture. Then the whole thing is dumped into the crust and frozen.

There are a couple of things I’d recommend changing. First, the authors have you put a layer of melted chocolate between the crust and the filling. The only purpose I found for this chocolate layer was to make it impossible to get the pie slices out of the pan. It didn’t add anything to the flavor, so I’d just leave it out. And the second change I’d make was to use either a springform pan or a square pan lined with tinfoil instead of a pie pan. The first couple of slices came out of the pan sans bottom crust. That crust was too hard to cut through. By pulling the pie out of the pan, you’ll get a better angle with the knife and can get a spatula or something underneath that bottom crust much easier.

The recipe also calls for an easy hot fudge sauce. The sauce was good and it went really nicely with the peanut butter filling.