The Peanut Butter Pie at Contempo Café is on many lists of Disney World’s best desserts, and we've got the obsession-worthy copycat recipe so you can enjoy this one at home!
Found at Disney's Contemporary Resort, this treat has been the star of Contempo Café’s bakery case for many years. Our first impression tasting it was, "WOW, this one lives up to the hype."
A big mound of peanut butter cream cheese filling sits on a silky layer of vanilla cream in a crispy and flavorful vanilla tart shell. The peanut butter filling is similar to an edible cookie dough. It's both thick and creamy, and sticks slightly to the roof of your mouth. It doesn't have a strong peanut butter taste, but rather a subtle peanut butter cookie flavor, with a sweet cream finish from the cream cheese.
After receiving a request for this recipe from a Diznify reader, we scoured the Internet for a Contempo Café Peanut Butter Pie recipe and couldn’t find it. Disney confirmed the recipe’s unavailability writing that, “Unfortunately, the Chefs are unable to give us this recipe for home use.” While researching what it’d take to pull this copycat off, we began to understand why. The thought of making tart shells and pastry cream was daunting to us. But, in reality, it’s not that bad!
Making tart shells is a similar process to making cutout sugar cookie dough, and pastry cream is close to pudding. Since tart shells are used in some of our favorite Disney desserts, including Hollywood Studios’ Fruit Tart, we’re happy to have these new skills in our culinary back pocket!
We've seen Contempo Café garnish their pies with Callebaut's Mini Chocolate Crispearls and Cocoa Barry Chocolate Flakes. We LOVE chocolate flakes, having first tasted them on the Darth Vader chocolate peanut butter cupcake at Hollywood Studios (which is, sadly, no longer available). Disney Springs' Sprinkles also uses them for their dark chocolate and black and white cupcakes. These flakes are absolutely delicious and great to have in your pantry to decorate desserts.
Like our Nomad Lounge Gluten Free Churros Copycat recipe, this copycat Contempo Café Peanut Butter Pie recipe is a few recipes wrapped into one. To make it easier, we recommend making the tart shells and pastry cream a day in advance. Then, the next day, whip up the peanut butter cream cheese filling and assemble the pies.
One thing that we don’t recommend delaying is eating the pies once assembled. If you must wait, store the pies in fridge. The peanut butter cream cheese filling hardens up in the fridge so, when ready to eat, allow the chilled pies to thaw at room temperature for about 30 to 40 minutes before eating.
Make Sure to Use Natural Peanut Butter!
It's important to use ONLY use natural peanut butter, the kind where the peanuts and oil separate. Non-natural brands of creamy peanut butter will not work because they require too much powdered sugar to achieve a cookie dough texture and will end up overly sweet. Going a step further, we think natural organic peanut butter is slightly less grainy than its non-organic counterpart, so we chose Smucker’s natural organic peanut butter.
Get a Quick Peanut Butter Pie Fix!
If you're in a pinch, you can get a taste for this recipe by spooning some of the peanut butter cream cheese filling (skip to making the peanut butter filling in the recipe, below) onto a store-bought, Walkers brand, round shortbread cookie. We'd rather see everyone enjoy this one in some form than dismiss it!
Ingredients
For the tart shells:
- 3/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1.5 tablespoons powdered sugar
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, very cold
- 1 egg yolk
- 1.5 teaspoons heavy cream
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
For the pastry cream:
- 1/2 cup whole milk
- 1/2 cup heavy cream
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the peanut butter filling:
- 1.25 cups organic powdered sugar, sifted
- 1/3 cup Smuckers Natural Organic creamy peanut butter Only use natural PB, the kind that separates, or the texture and sweetness won't be desirable.
- 1/3 cup cream cheese, cold
- 1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted
For the chocolate drizzle:
- 3 tablespoons semi-sweet chocolate chips
- 1 tablespoon whole milk
For decoration:
Special Supplies Needed:
- small food processor
- electric mixer
- parchment paper
- rolling pin
- 4 3.125" tart rings
- mesh strainer
- large ice cream scoop with trigger (also called a “disher”)
Instructions
Make the tart shells:
- In a small food processor, add the flour, sugar, butter and salt. Blend until you can no longer see big clumps of butter. Add the egg yolk, heavy cream and vanilla and blend until a dough forms. If a dough won’t come together, add another 1/2 teaspoon of heavy cream.
- Transfer the dough to parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour.If you’re also making the pastry cream, this is a good time to move on to step #2 (Make the Pastry Cream).
- Once the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prepare your baking sheet. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper and lay the tart rings on top, spacing them out evenly. There’s NO need to grease the tart rings.
- Divide the chilled dough into 4, equally-sized balls. One at a time, sandwich each ball of dough between two pieces of parchment paper and, using your hand, smash the ball into a disk. Then, using a rolling pin to roll each ball of dough into a circle about ¼ inch thick and 6” to 6.5” in diameter.
- Transfer the rolled-out dough to the tart ring and use your hands to make sure the dough reaches the inner bottom parchment paper and sides of the inner tart ring. The excess dough should spill over the top of the tart rings
- Once the dough is in place, put the baking sheet with dough-lined tart rings in the refrigerator for 10 minutes.
- Once chilled for 10 minutes, take the dough lined tart rings out of the fridge and roll a rolling pin on the top of each ring, cutting away the excess dough that is spilling over the sides of the rings.
- Remove this excess dough and discard it (or roll it out and use a cookie cutter to make a few cookies!).
- Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until the tart shells are very lightly browned. Once the tart shells are done cooking, you can immediately lift the tart ring up, releasing the shell out of the bottom of the ring. If the shell doesn’t release out of the tart ring right away, jiggle the ring lightly and/or scrape away any excess tart dough that’s cooked on the top of the ring and may be preventing the shell from being released.
- Transfer the tart shells to a drying rack to cool completely, approximately 1 hour before filling with pastry cream. The tart shells will keep for a day, covered and at room temperature, if you’re not assembling your pies right away.
Make the pastry cream:
- In a large bowl, whisk together the egg, cornstarch and sugar. Set this mixture aside to use later.
- In a saucepan, add the milk and cream. Heat over medium/medium-low just until boiling, whisking frequently to prevent burning.
- Once boiling, transfer the milk/cream mixture to a Pyrex measuring cup or another cup with a spout that’s easy to pour from. Whisking constantly, slowly pour the boiling milk/cream mixture into the egg mixture to combine.
- Wipe/rinse out the saucepan to remove any cooked milk that’s left in the pan.
- Transfer the combined cream/egg mixture back to the saucepan and over medium/medium-low heat while whisking constantly, bring the mixture to a boil. Once you see it’s started boiling, cook, continuing to whisk the cream for about 10 to 30 seconds or until the mixture thickens, then immediately remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract.
- Strain the pastry cream through a sieve or mesh strainer to remove any lumps.
- Transfer the pastry cream to a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, pressing the plastic wrap onto the surface of the pastry cream to prevent a film from forming on top of the cream. Put the pastry cream in the refrigerator and allow it to chill completely.The pastry cream will keep for a day in the fridge if you’re not assembling your pies right away.
Make the peanut butter cream cheese filling:
- Stir the peanut butter until smooth or remove the peanut butter from jar and beat using an electric mixer. Since the peanuts and oil separate, this step is really important. Don’t skip it!
- On the stovetop, melt butter gently over medium-low heat until just melted. Remove from burner, pour into another small bowl and set aside to cool slightly.
- Put the peanut butter into a medium-sized mixing bowl.
- Once butter has reached a lukewarm temperature, add the butter to the peanut butter and beat until combined.
- Then, add the cold cream cheese and beat until smooth.
- Finally, add the sifted powered sugar and beat until combined.
Assemble the peanut butter pies:
- Add 2 to 3 tablespoons of pastry cream inside each tart shell, just below the top edge of the tarts, and smooth the cream with a spoon.
- Run your ice cream scoop under hot water for about 20 seconds to warm it up, then dry the scoop off. Using your ice cream scoop, scoop just enough peanut butter cream cheese filling to fit into the scoop without spilling over (level the peanut butter cream cheese filling like you would if it was in a measuring cup). With each tart, add a scoop of peanut butter cream cheese filling on top of the pastry cream.
- Make a chocolate ganache. In a small saucepan, heat up 1 tablespoon of milk. Don’t let the milk boil. Add 3 tablespoons of semisweet chocolate chips and whisk until melted and combined, then remove from the heat.
- Take a small sandwich bag and snip off a little piece of the bottom edge to make a faux pastry bag. Transfer the ganache to the plastic bag and pipe ganache around the outside of the pie where the pastry cream meets the pie filling.
- Use a small Dixie cup or spoon to add chocolate flakes to the outside of the pie where you piped the ganache.
- Use the sandwich bag filled with chocolate ganache to pipe chocolate ganache, in a zig-zag pattern, over the top of the pie.
- Finish by adding a few candy pearls to the top of each pie and ENJOY! Once assembled, we highly recommend you eat the peanut butter pies right away. If you do not, store them in fridge and, when ready to consume, allow them to thaw at room temperature for 30 to 40 minutes so that the peanut butter cream cheese filling can reach the right consistency.
Beth Bowers
OMG, I can't wait to try this
Ikue
I, too, thank you for this recipe! I loved this dessert when I visited there two years ago and still dream about it.
Joanna
Thank you so much for this. I've been searching for a copycat recipe for this ever since I tried these on our last trip to Disney in 2016. Can't wait to try them!
Diznify
You're very welcome, Joanna! I hope you really enjoy it!