Adventures in Cooking: Peanut Butter Pi

Happy Pi Day! Once a year, on March 14, I put on my chef's hat and pretend I know how to make pie. This is mainly so I can show off my Pi Day masterpiece on social media, because everyone else does it. But I'll share a secret with you—I don't actually know how to make pie!

What I do know, is how to have grand Adventures in Cooking! This year's Adventure will take us into the depths of the kitchen, to use two of the best ingredients ever invented—cream cheese and peanut butter.

Please enjoy this peanut butter pi recipe!

Ingredients

4 oz. cream cheese
1 c. confectioner's sugar
1/3 c. peanut butter
1 c. whipped topping (semi-optional)
1 9-inch graham cracker crust

Steps

1. Whip cream cheese until light and fluffy. There is a lot of room for interpretation in this statement, but I take it to mean you should use an electric mixer. You should probably have a brand new hand mixer for this purpose, particularly one that likes to fling tiny particles of food all over your kitchen.
2. Beat in sugar and peanut butter. The addition of sugar will make the batter extremely dry, resulting in even more food particles flying everywhere! Wheee!
3. Fold whipped topping into peanut butter mixture. If you don't have whipped topping, don't worry; it's not like it's an essential part of the recipe or anything!
4. Since you don't have whipped topping, the batter will still be extremely dry and crumbly at this point. To help it soften up, add a hearty dollop of more peanut butter.
5. More peanut butter is not enough to liquify this recipe! Add an arbitrary amount of more cream cheese, until the mixture is soft enough to hold together.
6. By now, you should realize that you don't have a 9-inch graham cracker crust. That's the kind of thing that people who know how to make pie have around, and you are none such person! That's OK, though, because a graham cracker crust is basically just graham crackers and some other things, right? You can make one from scratch.
7. Start with four graham crackers. Crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin and pour them into a bowl. Make sure it's one of those bowls that gets blazingly hot in the microwave—this will be important later.
8. Add 2 teaspoons (or thereabouts) of sugar to the graham cracker crumbs.
9. A graham cracker crust needs something to hold it together, and that something is butter! Since you're just guessing at quantities by this point, grab a couple of those foil-wrapped pats of butter you get at restaurants (you do save those, right?) and dump them into the mix.
10. Microwave the mixture to melt the butter. Cook it in 30-second intervals until you get bored and the bowl has reached the temperature of lava, but the butter is still not melted.
11. Remove the still-solid butter from the bowl and place it in one of your measuring cups instead. Try microwaving it again, this time succeeding in melting it.
12. Mix the butter into the graham cracker mixture. 
13. This is not enough butter, so then add in a melted blob of butter that you took home with the bread from Cheesecake Factory. Waste not, want not!
14. Dump the the graham cracker mixture into two 5.5-inch pie tins, gingerly pressing it into the sides. Since you didn't use enough butter (even with the help of the Cheesecake Factory), it barely sticks to the sides, but that's OK. It will stick to your ooey-gooey pie filling.
15. Divide the pie filling into two portions, and dump each portion into a prepared pie crust.
16. Carefully press down the filling until it covers the crust, and you're done!
17. That is, unless you want to turn your peanut butter pie into peanut butter pi! In that case, you should use some chocolate chips to make the pi symbol on the top of your crust.
18. Refrigerate for a few hours, until the texture turns rather like cookie dough. Eat straight from the pan like some kind of heathen. Makes one 8-to-9-inch pie, two 5.5-inch pies, or 2.828 3.14-inch pies.

I actually had to do a lot of geometry to figure out if two 5.5-inch pies are equivalent to a 9-incher (they're not, but it works because I modified the recipe so much!), so let's all give 3.14 cheers to the number that made this Adventure in Cooking! possible!