Ewww!  Dan the Man and I are going to visit our Arkansas grandkids tomorrow, and I just couldn’t resist giving Princess M and Mr. Teen a Halloween gift of this delicious peanut butter pie!  The pie is fast and easy to make, and it’s always a hit with kids and adults alike.  The cockroaches were more problematic but well worth the trouble.  First the pie.

INGREDIENTS:

1 pre-made Oreo pie crust (A graham cracker crust will do, but I love the chocolate and peanut butter combo.)

1 cup creamy peanut butter

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened

1 8-oz. container of Cool Whip

Using a stand or hand mixer, beat the peanut butter, powdered sugar, cream cheese, and Cool Whip together until well mixed.  Scoop into the pie crust.  Refrigerate.

That’s it — easy squeazy!

I ran into a few problems as I mixed the pie ingredients, but that’s par for my crapsmanship course.  First, there was a hole in my sifter.  It’s likely that a few clumps of powdered sugar sneaked into the mix, but that didn’t worry me.  The peanut butter problem was more serious.  I’d bought natural peanut butter, forgetting that it often has peanut oil on the top.  As you can tell from the photo, it was just too oily and nasty to take a chance on, so I scrapped that cup of peanut butter and resorted to my trusty Jif already in my pantry.  I didn’t have quite a whole cup of Jif, but I made it work regardless.  Crapsmanship, right?  Once pie is ready to eat, no one will be able to tell the difference.

I could have stopped here.  A few chocolate sprinkles or some whipped cream would be perfect atop this pie.  But it’s Halloween.  And it’s for grandkids.  To keep my grandma cred, I had to spook it up.

For the edible part of the cockroaches, I used whole pitted dates, a little softened cream cheese, just a tad bit of powdered sugar, and some chopped up slivered almonds.  I first mixed the cream cheese with the powdered sugar and almonds. I made about a half cup, but I probably used only a couple tablespoons. I didn’t have a recipe and clearly overestimated what I’d need.  The dates were already split in half lengthwise, so I just spooned a small amount of cream cheese mixture into each date.  I tried to clean any cream cheese mixture off the outside of the dates.  They already looked good and gross, but I wasn’t done!

The antennae had me stymied until I saw some artificial stamens in the cooking section at Michaels.

I intended to make six cockroaches so took out two bundles and separate them until I had 12 ‘antennae.’  Using a black Sharpie, I colored each antenna black.

 I inserted two antennae into each cockroach …

and then put the six roaches on top of the pie.  I’d probably hesitate to use an inedible ingredient if I were serving this to really young kids, but my grandkids are six and fourteen, so I’m not worried.  Now if I can just convince them to eat this frightening treat!