Baked Sunday Mornings: Peanut Butter Chocolate Cream Pie

On the outside, this looks like this week's Baked Sunday Mornings assignment, Peanut Butter Banana Cream Pie, but on the inside it is NOT!  As readers of this blog may know, I really do not enjoy bananas.  However, I wanted to bake this week because I haven't made any of the most recent selections.  I went back and forth between making this as is and pawning it off on people or adapting it so that it was something I wanted to eat.  In the end, I decided that it is always good to to want to eat what I bake, and I adapted this pie and brought it to our end of the year staff meeting at school.  It was a big hit!

I did a couple of things differently than the recipe called for.  For the crust, I didn't bother with the food processor.  I just crushed up the vanilla wafters with a rolling pin, mixed in the melted butter and mixed it with the sugar.  It turned out fine -- just like a graham cracker crust.

My main adaptation was to change the banana pudding into chocolate pudding.  Instead of the vanilla bean and the bananas, I used 1/3 cup of cocoa powder.  The pudding was a little lumpy before it was set, but it was smooth once we ate it.  I made the peanut butter topping as written and the whole combination was terrific.  It was almost totally gobbled up at the meeting, but I tried to take a picture of what it looked like with the different layers.  Not my most successful photo, but you get the idea.  You can see the unmodified recipe here and also check out what other bakers created.