Alright, I’ve run out of reasons to procrastinate, so let’s get to it. Let’s talk pie. Like, extraordinary, intense, jaw-dropping, labor of love pie. That, is what this is. It is no joke, no make-me-on-a-whim-because-you-suddenly-got-a-hankerin-for-a-really-good-wedge-of-fluffy-banana-cream-pie. This baby takes time and patience; it’s definitely a celebratory pie if there ever was one and demands you to scream out after landing it gracefully on top of your highest pedestal for all to see, NAILED IT! Because you actually will. I have complete faith in you.

Unlike the more “traditional” banana cream — the one that involves pudding and wafer cookies, a banana and a pile of cool whip — this pie has five major components that each makes you invest your valuable nap time minutes (read: you will be making your own peanut butter, pastry cream and bourbon caramel, you can do it!). On an everyday basis I would be telling you streamline!, reduce it to one bowl!, substitute with things you already have stocked in your pantry! (peanut butter, I’m talking to you) but in this case, in this rare worth-it-to-spend-a-few-days-slaving moment, I want to tell you to forget it all just this once and do it the long way.

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We are no stranger haters to crispy treats here. We will polish off a pan before dinner and another one afterward — it’s just how we roll. They manage to satisfy both my husband and me — perhaps two of the farthest people on the sliding sweet scale. With a yearly birthday cake like this one (you’ll need a gallon of milk at the ready for downing purposes after your first sliver), it’s pretty much a dead give away that my husband has the sweet tooth of a marshmallow peep stuffed with gumdrops injected with pixy stix all coated in a caramel chocolate turtle shell with pop rocks sprinkled on top. I joke not. Me? I forgo the pies, and pass on normal portions of cake. I like the salty. I much rather eat salt and vinegar chips over a spongy red velvet cream cheese tower. My pitfall, however, is ice cream. It’s all perfect. It is all suited for my mouth. My next pitfall: crispy treats. It’s no wonder the discovery of brown butter crispy treats that were salted was like discovering the best way to blow my mind.

Our lucky streak with those crispy treats didn’t stop there. In fact the next year I tried peanut butter crispy treats. They had a caramel candy coated crispy layer topped with a thick, slightly salty chocolate peanut butter layer, and if that wasn’t enough, a layer of pure chocolate ganache was smoothed out on top. But these, these peanut butter and brown butter crispy treats are the perfect blend, the insanely correct meld, the impeccably ridiculously awesome mesh of the former two treats in one (minus the chocolate, though frankly, I think a thin slip of ganache on top would be wonderful). It has the salty peanut butter and the nutty brown butter mixed together with some overly puffy marshmallows that come together to smother crispy cereal until it all becomes intoxicated with everything I love in life. After this guy, of course.

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If you are on a diet, trying to eat healthy, maintaining the slim physic I know you all sport around or don’t like chocolate, peanut butter or the combination of the two then I suggest you look the other way because today we are talking about cake. Yes, more cake, more three and four layered towers of frosted confections that are insanely sweet and the worst enemy to your little black dress and endless diets you are all secretly wanting an out of. Now I know I have talked about this cake no less than 380 times in the last year and a half and now you all can see for yourselves why it is requested for any occasion that needs cake (and that is all occasions if you are my husband).

In this house, my husband has whittled it down to a look. Honey, what should I make for the barbecue on Saturday? Followed by the look. The make the chocolate peanut butter monstrosity that I love or I will disown you as a baker and my wife look. The seriously you are asking what to bring when you know I want everyone wants chocolate peanut butter and there is no better combination than the three layer sour cream chocolate cake covered in peanut butter frosting and then draped in a chocolate peanut butter ganache look. Yes, he has mastered it.

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March refused to end on a good note as I have had to battle against sloppy brisket, air-born fish in one of my biggest hissy fits to date and hors d’oeuvres that looked so unappealing I almost couldn’t eat them myself and I found the most unsightly, biggest fear of all on my head. It was a gr… a greaaa…. I can’t even say it. I am refusing to believe it’s true. I found a blonde hair mixed in between my dark brown locks, which is common right? Totally normal for a person to randomly start growing a different color up top.

It is something I have obsessed about since high school. Checking my part, my roots, the tips of hair follicles that take the daily path of falling out of my head, and I was dreading, no loathing, no cursing the day that I found my first gr… blonde hair. My husband having to deal with a wife going through no less than three panic attacks in a week because the tip of this one small little hair could possibly, if held in the right light at the right angle be perceived as a blonde hair. It is a horrible thing to be a premature blonde when your whole world has been brunette.

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Josh loves three things in this world: chocolate, peanut butter and nutella. I fall in somewhere after those three, and really I’m only so high on that list because I make him things like this and this. Alright, that may be somewhat of an exaggeration but seriously for the last three years he has requested the same chocolate peanut butter cake, and don’t get me wrong I would make anything he wanted, repeatedly, but it gets monotonous. I want to be given the reins to create a master piece, to conquer the balance between not too sweet yet decadently rich with flavor and to frankly make something other than chocolate and peanut butter.

This time around, after he realized he does in fact love me more than chocolates, peanut butter and all the sweets in the world he decided to give me a little more freedom, but only because I begged, and pleaded and told him that I  was going to do it. I made him his stupid chocolate peanut butter cake, which is really quite good, and then, after being given the stipulation that the second cake must also be chocolate peanut butter, I decided to do an icebox cake because they intrigue me. For one, they are pretty and layered and have stacks of chocolate cookies and cream almost like an open oreo, and I do love oreos. Second, it’s not overly sweet, or at least the whole half cup of sugar for the entire cake certainly gave the implication it would not be a comatose inducing sugar laden mound of mile high sweetness that his favored cake usually is. Thirdly, I always wondered how cookies would taste in a cake. Would they be crumbly? Hard? Break easily? Or would they be mushy and perhaps soggy?

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