Gluten-free chocolate peanut butter pie using GFree Sweet Ready to Roll Pastry

At the Allergy Show I picked up some sweet shortcrust pastry to try.  This was very kindly given to me by Deli Divine, who stock the pastry in their online shop. It is made by a brand called GFree, and since the only gluten-free pastry I’ve tried before is the Dietary Specials pastry (fine to roll, not very tasty though), I was interested to give it a go.

During one of my fast days (yes, I’m still on the 5:2 diet…) I started fantasising about the pie I would make. Perhaps a pumpkin pie? Or what about a pecan pie? Lemon meringue? These thoughts soon resulted in me feeling far hungrier than I normally do, so left the pie fantasies until today, when I was rooting about in the cupboard for something sweet and came across a big pot of farmer’s market peanut butter. What about a peanut butter pie?!? Is that even a thing? I googled it, and yes, it’s a thing.

But the other half isn’t that fond of peanut butter, so I thought I could help by making it a CHOCOLATE peanut butter pie. I came across this recipe, which seemed like it would make the sort of pie I was after, only I didn’t have chocolate in the house and being the warmest day of the year (a staggering 24C!) I was too tired to go to the shops. Luckily we also needed more baking paper, so I bribed the boyfriend with the promise of pie and he dutifully went out to get baking paper and chocolate.

The instructions on the recipe were a little hard to decipher and I’m not sure whether my filling thickened appropriately. I left it to set overnight, but as you can see from some of the pictures, the filling was still a little goopy. Tasted wonderful though!

The pastry itself was absolutely divine! It was great to knead and roll out, it didn’t stick or split or flake. I tasted some of the uncooked pastry and it was a lot more flavoursome than the DS shortcrust pastry (yeah, I’m weird, I like raw dough).

It did puff up while baking though, so blind baking is vital. No need to get fancy tools, I used some baking paper and some dried chickpeas and it worked perfectly.

For this pie, I followed this recipe with a couple of tweaks:

• I added approx 3 tbsp of crunchy peanut butter (100% peanuts) at the end
• I used Isabel’s GF baking fix instead of xanthan gum
• I added 3 tbsp sugar instead of 1/4 tsp stevia – the mixture was quite bitter and I wanted it a little sweeter 😉
• I added white chocolate and fudge chunks to the mixture at the end, and once the pie had been in the fridge for an hour or so, I sprinkled more on top.

The pastry was absolutely wonderful in terms of handling, baking and taste. I shall definitely keep a couple in my freezer for any impromptu pie making in the future!