Peanut Butter Pie - with Chocolate: Yummy Frozen Dessert!

Are you craving peanut butter pie? If you are, you've come to the right place! Welcome to my online cooking school for southern food. More specifically, this is about southern desserts! Delicious, rib-sticking southern food is even better when it's finished with a tasty dessert. A sweet treat following an enjoyable meal adds an exclamation point to the entrée, metaphorically speaking. Southern food is rich and satisfying, and so are most southern desserts. Today’s culinary art is a scrumptious dessert, frozen chocolate-peanut butter pie. Yes, we southerners really like frozen desserts - especially in the hot, humid summer months. And who can resist the wonderful flavor combination of peanut butter and chocolate? This peanut butter pie is sort of like biting into a cold, fluffy Reese Cup. It's totally addictive. It’s smooth and creamy, with just a touch of crunch and a hint of salty goodness from the peanut butter. Top it all off with a generous drizzle of chocolate or fudge, and this peanut butter pie is a real winner!

Peanut butter pie is big in the South. We grow lots of peanuts here, you know, so we’ve come up with numerous ways to enjoy the goobers. We roast them, boil them, fry them, make them into peanut brittle, and dip them in chocolate. Sometimes we even add peanuts to meat dishes and salads. Most of the peanuts, however, are ground into peanut butter, which is usually the main ingredient in peanut butter pie recipes.

There are lots of peanut butter pie recipes. Many southern cooks like to add peanut butter to their cheesecake mixture and call it peanut butter cheesecake. Okay, it’s called “cake,” but as you know, it’s really more like a pie. You can make a super quick and easy version of this type of peanut butter pie by combining a block of softened cream cheese, Cool Whip, peanut butter, sugar, and a little vanilla. Just stir the ingredients until smooth and spoon the mixture into a graham cracker pie crust. Chill until firm, and you have a tasty peanut butter pie recipe to share with your family!

This is a quick, easy peanut butter pie that’s wonderful on those hot summer days! It’s very decadent – with that amazing flavor combination of peanut butter and chocolate. I usually use vanilla ice cream in the recipe, but you can also use vanilla frozen yogurt or low fat or even fat-free ice cream. Sugar-free ice cream works, too! If you want more chocolate flavor, use chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla.

You can make changes to the crust, too. You might want to use a regular pie crust instead of the graham cracker crust. In that case, you'll need to blind-bake the crust first and cool it before filling it. A chocolate wafer crust is also great for peanut butter pie, as it adds another element of chocolate.

And speaking of chocolate, I like lots of it with peanut butter pie recipes. I prefer to use fudge ice cream topping, but you might prefer using melted chocolate. Also, the Magic Shell chocolate or fudge topping that hardens when it gets cold is an easy option.