Vegan Chocolate Peanut Pie

Oh, this was good, good, good! Not perfect, but chocolaty deeelicious.


I have a cookbook titled Retro Pies. It doesn’t have a plentitude of recipes I would like to try to veganize, but this southern Chocolate Peanut Pie definitely got my attention. I will give you the recipe as I made, then tell you how I think it would have been perfect.

Chocolate Peanut Pie

The filling cooks up in layers – kind of gooey on the bottom and almost crispy on top, and the crunchy peanuts rise to the top.

Ingredients:

2 (1 oz.) squares unsweetened baking chocolate
¼ cup margarine
¼ cup brown or turbinado sugar
¾ cup white sugar
½ cup nondairy milk
2 T. maple syrup
2 T. light corn syrup (karo)
2 t. vanilla
3 EnerG eggs
1 cup salted peanuts, coarsely chopped
1 unbaked 9-inch pie crust

Directions:

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Make 3 EnerG eggs and set aside.

Melt chocolate and margarine together in a small saucepan over very low heat. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

Combine sugars, milk, syrups, and vanilla in a mixing bowl and beat with electric beaters or in your electric mixer. Add eggs and mix well. Mix in chocolate mixture until well combined. Stir in peanuts. Pour the mixture into the pie crust.

Bake for about 45 minutes or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Cool thoroughly before slicing.

I know it seems really sugary, but even for me it seems perfectly balanced by the salty peanuts. So, my suggestions for improvement:

Can you tell there is no crust on my pie? I made a chocolate cookie crust and it literally melted away! Lesson learned – cookie crusts are for pies that do not require baking. Use a sturdy, i.e., standard pie crust for this recipe.

Did you notice this is a flourless (gluten free) pie? I had to refrigerate my pie to get it to set up completely. I don’t normally attempt to veganize recipes that contain 3 eggs, and this is why. I think a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch or flour (AP or GF) would give this pie the stability it needs. But hey, its still crazy hot here and we did not mind eating a cold pie!

This Chocolate Peanut Pie was for my mom’s birthday party. It was actually for the vegans and all chocolate lovers. After I baked this pie, I made a pie especially for my lemon lovin’ mom. Her birthday pie was a simple but very lemony pie, made with lots of love. It was not vegan because my mom is not vegan, but it could have been by using vegan cream cheese and milk. It turned out perfectly creamy and beautiful and my mom loved it.

I would have posted this nonvegan pie anyway, but I am posting it specially tonight as a show of solidarity for my friend Veggie Girl. I will let her address her issues on her own, but I will take this opportunity now to remind my readers to be compassionate to all beings. Where is it written that vegans should be kinder to animals than they are to humans?

And finally, I have had THREE very nice happenstances recently! Some of my Facebook and Twitter pals know I’ve been sick for the past several days, so fun stuff while I’ve been sick has been really great. (I'm feeling much better this evening.) So, I won TWO blog giveaways!!! First I won a whole box of chocolate Weil bars from Pride & Vejudice, plus Nora threw in 2 extra flavors.

Thank you, Nora! I’ve been enjoying these bars almost every day.

AND I won Kristen’s complete set of Raw ebooks! Yep, all eleven books full of recipes and information I am reading as fast as I can. Thank you again, Kristen!

(Oh, I should remind you now to enter MY giveaway – drawing this Sunday the 23rd.)

The third and most rewarding thing was an email I got. It began, “Hi Diann, I have been an avid reader of your blog for over a year now. I am ready to take the plunge to become a vegan…”

And life is good.