Mascarpone Peanut Butter Pie with Cocoa Crust

Thanks to Fifteen Spatulas for this wonderful recipe. Monday evening I served this dessert to our Mexican Train gang. They were thoroughly impressed. So was I. It was wonderfully light.... very mousse like. I did a little adapting of Fifteen Spatulas' recipe. I made the addition of puffy swirls of whipped cream. It was a sight to behold.

Ingredients:
5 oz unsalted peanuts (1 cup)
3 tbsp sugar+2 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
4 tbsp melted butter
2 tbsp flour
3 oz (3/4 cup) powdered sugar
1 cup peanut butter (creamy or crunchy, up to you)
8 oz tub mascarpone cheese
1 cup heavy cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup chopped bittersweet chocolate

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2. In a food processor, pulse the peanuts until finely chopped, but do not pulse it into peanut butter. Add the 3 tbsp sugar, cocoa powder, melted butter, and flour. Pulse to combine, then scrape it out into a pie plate or cake pan (I just used a 9 inch cake round). Press the mixture out evenly with your fingers, pushing the crust partway up the sides. Bake the crust for 10 minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.

3. With a hand mixer, beat the mascarpone cheese with the peanut butter and the powdered sugar until smooth and creamy.

4. In a separate bowl, whip the cream, 2 tbsp sugar, and vanilla extract to soft peaks.

5. Gently fold 1/3 of the cream into the peanut butter mascarpone to lighten. Fold the rest of the cream in and spread the filling out into your crust. Top with the chopped chocolate, and cover with plastic wrap. Freeze for 3-4 hours. Now, I like to eat this somewhere between frozen and chilled because I find that refrigerated pie makes for too loose of a filling, whereas frozen is a bit too hard (though better than the chilled one). So take the pie out of the freezer 10 minutes or so before you want to eat it. Enjoy!!!

Peanut Trivia: Did you know?

1. The two major peanut producers in the US are, in order, Georgia and Texas; peanuts are also Georgia's official state crop, with at least 50% of the production being used for peanut butter. Other minor peanut producers are Alabama, Florida, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma and Virginia. (Hooray....it's great being number one.)

2. An 18oz jar of peanut butter needs 850 peanuts to be made.

3. The USA produce about 6% of the world's crop of peanuts: by comparison India and China, together, produce about 70%. About 65% of those peanuts are used worldwide for the production of peanut oil; another 20% is used for the production of candy.

4. Peanut oil accounts for 8% of the worldwide edible oil production.

5. The national peanut month is March: it started as the national week in 1941 and was later "promoted" to a full month in 1974.

6. Two presidents of the USA, Jimmy Carter and Thomas Jefferson, were peanut farmers.

7. Peanuts are not actually nuts: they are legumes and grow underground.

8. Peanuts account for 2/3rds of the total snack "nuts" consumption in the USA.

9. The world's largest peanut is 20 feet tall, and it's currently kept in Turner County, Georgia. (What?)

10. One acre of peanut crop yields 2860 pounds of peanuts, enough to make 30000 peanut butter sandwiches.

11. Americans eat 700 million pounds every year (3lbs per person), which could theoretically cover the entire floor of the Grand Canyon. (Who thinks up this stuff? Is this where our tax money goes. Because it really is very important to know this.)