Day 2, dish 2 of the Thanksgiving Dessert Bonanza!  Last night I took on the mighty flavor that was pumpkin.

FORM OF: Pumpkin Cream Pie!!

I was a little concerned at first about what I was going to do for the pumpkin third of my dessert trifecta; I knew I wanted a pumpkin pie, but I honestly didn’t have any recipes in mind.  Luckily, just as I was resigning myself to a random Google search the lovely Joy the Baker posted her recipe for Almost No-Bake Pumpkin Cream Pie with Maple Whipped Cream.  This was just the kind of twist on a standard pumpkin pie I was looking for, so I went for it.

Actually, let me amend that.  I went for the filling, and will probably go for the whipped topping.  After the pecan pie bar experiment with the crust, I thought I’d give myself a rest.

For Slackers: One of my favorite cheating methods for pie-making is buying pie crust dough.  You probably already know that you can buy a ready-to-go crust at any grocery store, and that’s awesome.  But if you want to trick people into thinking you’re actually that much classier, you can also go to the biscuit aisle of your grocery store and buy a pre-made circle of pie dough.  All you have to do is roll it right out onto a pan and bake it.  Easy peasy.

This is what I did.  I felt a little guilty…but only a little.  Mostly I just felt happy that I could spend what would otherwise be crust-making time watching Harold Crick:

If you’ve never seen Stranger Than Fiction you really should go rent it; it’s a fun little bit of strange, plus Will Ferrell is great in a pseudo-serious role.  Apparently I’m on a Will Ferrell kick this week.

But anyway, on to the pie!

One of the best things about this pie is, as its title describes, that it’s basically no-bake.  This means once you get the 15 minutes of baking done with the crust, you’re done with the oven.  The rest is “mix in the mixer, dump into the pie crust.”  I like things that require minimal effort.

Speaking of minimal effort…guess who finally bought a caaaan openeeeeer?

While cutting your cans open with a knife is completely doable, and while I was totally getting mad props about my can-stabbing badassery, really…just go buy a damn can opener.

Thus, a pie was born:

Unlike Joy’s beautiful pie, you will notice mine has lumps.  That’s because of two things: (1) I made a small mistake, and (2) I was lazy.

The mistake was that I don’t think I let the butter soften quite enough before mixing it with the cream cheese.  Joy recommends in her recipe that you make sure both are soft enough before mixing so you don’t get lumps.  D’oh.

The laziness was that she also recommends running the filling through a strainer if you do have lumps.  Which….I didn’t bother to do.  *yawn*

Despite the lumps, however, the filling turned out fantastically.  This recipe also uses Joy’s Pumpkin Pie Spice, and it is amazing how much the right blend of spices can transform some cream cheese and pumpkin puree into a full fledged pumpkin pie.  And you know what?  I actually lied: one of the best things about this cake is that there are no eggs in it, so I can (and did) lick the entire spatula clean and still be positive I’m not getting salmonella.  Go team.

Final analysis: this pie is awesome.  I’ll be sure to take some follow-up pictures once I add the maple whipped cream before serving.

PS – Publix was a disaster the other day.  Not only did they run out of large bags of pecans AND bittersweet baking chocolate (no joke – the entire row for each of these was completely empty), but they ALSO ran out of small jars of nutmeg.  Because I was a fool and waited until the week of Thanksgiving to do any real dessert planning, I was thusly forced to buy a much larger jar of nutmeg than anyone ever needs.  I guess I’ll be looking for recipes with nutmeg in the future…any suggestions?

Maybe I should have known better, but seriously?  It’s Thanksgiving!  I demand a never-ending supply of all the ingredients I need! *grumps*