Peanut Butter Pie with Cookie Crust

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Happy Mother’s Day! How better to celebrate than with chocolate and peanut butter?

This year marks the first Mother’s Day since 2008 that I haven’t spent any time with my own mother. My parents moved back to New York last year, and it’s still weird that I can’t just drive over and see them whenever I want to. Fortunately, I still have family close by!

This recipe marks another step in my journey to make every Baked recipe. I wish I could say that I’m going in some kind of order, but I’m not. This pie is in the very first Baked cookbook. I was looking for something chocolatey, because when the mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law are involved, it just has to be chocolate.

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Crunchy Peanut Butter Banana Bread

IMG_0804Ok, so I like baking with bananas. I bought a few to make cookies to send to my grandmother (that’s a separate blog post!), and I bought a few extra also. I told the husband that he could eat them if he wanted to, because last time I bought extra bananas, I nearly chopped his hand off when he went to take one.

By the middle of last week, none of the bananas had been eaten. Husband was working from home, so I told him to grab all my Baked books (yep, I have four) and pick a banana recipe for me to make. He chose a recipe from Baked Elements, which is a really cool dessert cookbook that has the recipes put into categories based on their main ingredient.

This is a recipe that could have gone in the banana category or the peanut butter category, but the Baked guys chose to put it in the peanut butter category. Bananas were definitely included, but the peanut butter is the reason that the husband chose it, so peanut butter is certainly an acceptable choice.

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Back to New York

IMG_0587I just got back from a long weekend in New York, so you know I ate tons of good food! The photos above are all from my excursion to Baked in Brooklyn – more about that in a bit.

I spent my first day and night in New York in Westchester with my parents, so nothing terribly exciting there. For my first city food, I went Italian for dinner, and then went with ice cream for dessert, despite the cold and rain.

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Baked Brownies

Well, whether you like it or not, dear readers (assuming I have some), this post continues my Baked obsession.

My main desserts are cookies and cupcakes. For the most part, that’s just because those are my favorite things. But also, I stink at cutting things into pieces. It’s possible that I have never cut a straight line in my life, and certainly not with a knife.

Despite this minor flaw, I sometimes venture into other forms of dessert. The other day, I decided that I needed to make the famous Baked brownie. It’s a favorite of both America’s Test Kitchen and Oprah, so I figured there was a good chance it would be a favorite around here too.

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Oopsy Daisy Cake


Remember my obsession with Baked? Well, it’s ongoing. I take every opportunity to make something from one of their books! This cake, unlike the Devil’s Food Cake, is a complete Baked recipe!

So for my husband’s birthday, I told him he could pick any cake he wanted… from a Baked book. My husband and I have been married for one year and together for four, and I had never before made him a birthday cake! Every year, different circumstances have prevented this from happening. This year, I was determined to make something amazing, and that meant a Baked cake.

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Devil’s Food Cake with Angel Frosting

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When I went on the dessert tour in NYC back in May, it was based out of Manhattan only. On that trip, the only Brooklyn dessert place we made it to was the Brooklyn Farmacy. Of course that was delicious, but I was also introduced to another Brooklyn bakery on that trip, although in writing only.

There are many reasons that Laura and I are friends, but of course one of which is that we both enjoy baking. While staying in her apartment, I was handed three dessert cookbooks and told to read them. Of course I obliged, and I immediately wanted those books for my very own. Fortunately, my wonderful in-laws gifted me all three for my birthday!

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