Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie
- 3 mins
I was craving something peanut buttery and still curious about vegan baking, so I looked through a few cookbooks and landed on two recipes from Chef AJ's Sweet Indulgence: This PB Chocolate Cheesecake and her Snickers Pie.
This pie is a crowd pleaser and, in my opinion, doesn't suffer from any issues that vegan recipes often encounter when they try to mimic a traditionally non-vegan recipe. The ingredients are simple and clean (really as clean as you could ask for a dessert) making it not only vegan, but also gluten free, (technically) no added sugar (instead using date syrup and date puree), and no added sodium (in case that's important to you when eating a rich, decadent dessert).
I personally prefer this to the Snickers Pie, since it's almost exactly the same peanut butter filling plus a layer of chocolate filling. The chocolate filling is thick and decadent with the peanut butter filling being a bit softer but still plenty rich and peanut buttery. The crust, ganache topping, and peanut topping add more peanut flavor and complimentary chocolate flavors as well as a delightful variety of textures. Despite being as rich and decadent as it is, I don't feel guilty eating this like I would after eating a traditional cheesecake.
The recipe calls to keep the pie frozen, but if you serve it straight out of the freezer then the texture will be like taking a bite out of a fudgesicle. If you're not into that, you can leave it in the fridge for a couple hours before serving or let it defrost at room tempurature until it's soft enough to easilly eat with a fork.
This recipe is quite simple in terms of preparation, although it can take some time waiting for each layer to firm up before proceeding with the next. It requires no baking, instead preparing the crust and the fillings one layer at a time in a food processor and then freezing before proceeding to the next layer. Making the topping requires a double boiler but it's a pretty easy affair.
However, getting the ingredients was far more difficult than assembling this recipe. I had to go to a special grocery store for the right kind of tofu, but getting either unsweetened or date-sweetened vegan chocolate chips was the real struggle. Paying retail price for the amount of chocolate chips for this recipe would've been close to $20, but the only two suitible options I could find had such low availability that it was nearly not feasible to source them. Buying either option online would've required buying 6 bags of chocolate chips for like $80-$90 and the only retail location I could find that had either option available was out of stock the few times I checked. Thankfully, after some struggling I was able to get what I needed for only a slightly higher cost than retail price with the help of a free trial of a grocery delivery subscription.
To harp on a largely pedantic semantic note I've mentioned before when I made vegan cheesecake cookie bars, I prefer to refer to this as a pie rather than a cheesecake despite the title of the recipe given to it by it's creator. I feel like it's a more accurate description that doesn't set up expectations of a traditional recipe that a vegan recipe can't reasonably meet. Although, multiple people who tried this said they wouldn't have guessed it was vegan and I agree it does match the consistency and feel of a cheesecake/custard pie more closeley than the cheesecake bars I previously made.