Unless a blog is dedicated to baking, I frown on attention-starved cooking blogs with a page full of dessert close-up photography. I also frown on most cakes. I usually can’t bring myself to enjoy eating a frosting-covered mound of flour, even to be polite. Other sweets like apple pie à la mode and oatmeal raisin cookies are more tempting, but I can pass them up without much suffering. But chocolate—well, that’s my weakness. I love chocolate, especially 70%-75% dark chocolate. (Milk chocolate is for wusses.) Pair the flavor of pure chocolate with espresso and a dash of salt, and you may as well pry the dessert from the hands of my stiff corpse.

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Gale Grand has a decadent recipe for Peanut Butter Pie. I made 1.5x the original recipe for both the filling and the crust, but added my own twist with a thin layer of ganache—and not just any ganache either, but a dark chocolate espresso ganache. The flavor was spectacular! The nutty crust and intense chocolate-espresso were the perfect complements to the creamy peanut-butter filling.

For an interesting variation, try Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake or Chocolate Espresso Peanut Butter Bars, the latter with a cream-free peanut butter spread similar to Alton Brown’s peanut butter pie filling.

The Crust

The crust tastes similar to nutter butter, but with a crunchier crumbly texture and better flavor. Perfect. Chocolate lovers: resist the urge to replace the graham crackers with a chocolate crumb. The chocolate will come later and in style.

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