Sugar-Free Peanut Butter Pie (step-by-step)

I had some time tonight, so I actually made the pie! Just for completeness, I will include the recipe again. If you saw my research post, I should note that this recipe isn’t quite the same as what I posted before. What you see here is what I adapted into.

Jordan’s Sugar-Free Peanut Butter Pie

(modified from this recipe over at all-recipe, and using advice from a commenter)

Ingredients

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
• 1 1/2 cups  Splenda
• 16-oz natural creamy peanut butter (one jar of the Smucker’s Natural)
• 1 cup milk
• 1 standard pie crust

Directions

• Beat together cream cheese and Splenda.
• Mix in peanut butter and milk. Beat until smooth.
• Spoon into pie shell
• Cover, freeze until firm.

That is the recipe, now to actually start:

I made the crust first:

My recipe for the pie crust said to bake for 8-10 minutes. Apparently They were planning on my having rolled the crust out a lot thinner, because I baked this for over 20 minutes! I think it could have gone longer, but I didn’t want to risk burning it. Given that this pie will be served frozen I don’t suppose it matters if the crust is a little soft. The actual recipe calls for Graham Cracker crust, and I am sure that would work fine. Heather is always looking for ways to avoid sugar, and I thought it would be more fun to make a real pie crust, so that’s what I did. (this is also what I did last year)

As the crust was baking, I started on the filling:

I forget how nice a powered mixer can be sometimes, although I am glad the one we have is small. Splenda behaves just like powdered sugar, and can usually be substituted by volume anywhere the sugar is used. Heather kind of turned against it a while back, but if I coat it in enough peanut butter she will still give it a try 🙂

Speaking of peanut butter that was the next step:

As I was in the process of adding the peanut butter, I realized that the recipe I hacked up to get this actually used half a tub of ‘whipped topping’ in the mix. With that in the back of my mind, I started increasing the amount of peanut butter in the measuring cup a little. Once I had one and a half cups I realized there was only about half a cup of peanut butter left in the jar anyway. What you see here could be said to have 100% more peanut butter!!

Here is the point where the long cook time of the crust was starting to be a problem. Despite my having posted a ‘done’ picture of the crust, it was still in the oven when I snapped the picture of the filling all ready to go. I pulled it out a minute later, but I don’t think you should really put the filling into a hot crust. It might be ok, but I was afraid it would make the filling melt into strange layers or something else weird. I ended up putting the crust into the spot that I had cleared out in the freezer, sans-filling for a while so it wouldn’t try to cook the filling.

The finished product:

You could top this with ether low-sugar, or sugar-free whipped-topping before serving, but I think leaving it off makes it easier to sell as low-sugar. 🙂

-Jordan