Peanut Butter Pie

Sorry I disappeared there for a minute.  The kids (and the parents, of course) got their first winter illness.  A lovely stomach flu.  Yeah.  Not a lot of eating going on around here for a few days.  Yuck.  But, luckily, we are all recovered now and enjoying a visit from Grandpa Al.  :)  And I have a great recipe to make up for my absence.

You know Valentine's Day is coming up.  I'm not a big one for going all out for the Hallmark holiday but I don't think it is such an awful thing to have a holiday that reminds us to do something nice/special for the ones we love, either.  My kids are too young for sweets yet so I'm going to get them some cute and sappy board books and write an equally cute and sappy note inside for them.  My husband will probably get sweets....sorry to ruin the surprise honey!

This weekend I was looking to get rid of some peanut butter without making peanut butter cookies.  I turned to my new favorite obsession, Pinterest of course, and quickly found a peanut butter pie that looked pretty darn good.   This classic combination of chocolate and peanut butter is a sure to be a great way to say "I love you" to your honey....I hope you try it!

Peanut Butter Pie, adapted from Danielle at Let's Dish

Crust:

24 Oreo cookies

1/4 cup butter, melted

Filling:

1 (8oz) package cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup peanut butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

sweetened whipped cream 

To make a classic chocolate pie crust just put 24 oreo cookies into your food processor and pulse until you have fine crumbs.  Pour the crumbs into  a medium bowl and mix them together with the melted butter.  Once they are nice and crumbly, dump it all into a buttered pie dish.

Press the crumbs evenly across the bottom and up the sides.  Viola!  Chocolate crust with leftover cookies to boot, yeah!

Now to begin the filling you'll want to first make your whipped cream.  Once that is done, scoop it out and put it into separate bowl.  Put the cream cheese and sugar into your mixer (you don't need to clean the bowl) and mix until smooth.  Add the peanut butter and vanilla and mix it up again.  Now fold in your whipped topping (or mix it in the mixer on a low setting).  Scoop the filling into the pie crust and smooth it out evenly.  Refrigerate at least four hours!

When you are ready to serve whip up another batch of whipped cream and spoon it over each slice.  I also topped my pie slices with a little bit of chopped chocolate bar to make it extra pretty. :)  Enjoy!

P.S. You can follow my pins at http://pinterest.com/cmagyar/