Right off the top, I feel the need to disclose that I’m not a huge fan of Banana Cream Pie in general. I still wanted to make this for two reasons. One, I love a good peanut butter and banana sandwich, so I thought I could get on board with this pie. Two, this is the pie the Baked boys made on Throwdown! with Bobby Flay (recap of the episode here).

When I went to see Matt & Renato at Williams-Sonoma when Baked Explorations came out, the boys jokingly alluded to the fact that they lost the Throwdown before it even began. Apparently, one of the judges (Rose Levy Beranbaum) doesn’t like peanut butter, so this pie was doomed from the get-go against Bobby’s more traditional take.

Of course I wanted to see for myself, and I can conclude that if you love peanut butter, this pie is delicious, although still not quite enough to push me over the edge into a full-fledged BCP fan. It was oddly easy to pull together, which is always a nice surprise, although it did use up a whole bunch of bowls. These are the components stacked from the bottom up:

  1. Vanilla wafer crust (nice change from the usual graham cracker crust)
  2. Vanilla bean pudding (delicious on it’s own)
  3. Sliced bananas (with a neat trick I’ll explain below)
  4. Peanut butter cream cheese mixture, lightened with whipped cream (yum)
  5. Reese Bites for decoration (much better than chocolate covered peanuts, in my opinion)

The recipe has a trick to keep the bananas from turning black, which is to toss them in orange juice, and then blot them with a paper towel before arranging them on top of the pudding. This scared me because I was nervous I would end up with Peanut Butter Orange Banana Cream Pie, but in the end you can’t even taste the citrus at all. Bananas totally kept their colour, too.

One final note on the timing. I knew that with a multi-layer concoction such as this, it’s better to split everything up so each layer has a chance to do it’s thing (i.e. crust needs to cool, pudding and peanut butter layers need to set). I made the crust yesterday morning, pudding in the afternoon, left that to set all evening, and added the bananas and peanut butter layer when I got home from the movies last night. I left the whole thing in the fridge overnight and it set up perfectly (unlike this hot mess from my Banana Cream Pie-making past), and sliced like a dream this morning.

Hmmm…funny…when I started writing this post I didn’t think I had much to say! ha!

You can find the recipe here!

And for more Baked Sunday Mornings click here!