Peanut Butter Eclair Cake for the Peanut Butter Boy

Nick the Peanut Butter Boy, whose food blog is a paean to the nutty paste and whom I suspect may be a gluten-free blogger as well, is having his third Great Peanut Butter Exposition. This foodie contest involves peanut buttery cakes and so this was the perfect excuse to try out Lea is Gluten Free's Peanut Butter Eclair Cake, one of the oldest recipes in my To-Be-Cooked pile. I am not planning to officially enter the contest as this is not my original recipe, but just wanted to join in the cooking fun.

The recipe takes a while, as you must cook stuff on the stove, mix it in a mixer, cool it, throw on another mixer batch of peanut butter pudding, cool some more and then top off with whipped cream (I don't do Cool Whip with its periodic-table-of-contents ingredients list) and chocolate sauce, so it's not a recipe I would make often.

The caloric content is probably off the charts too, so there's another reason to limit supply, but the demand for it among my family and friends was high! A dessert winner! It's a gooey, rich, comfort dessert that seemed to get better the next morning, when we had it for a completely decadent breakfast. But I'm sure the Peanut Butter Boy would approve of that, he of the Peanut Butter and Banana Omelets and Chocolate/PB/Cream Cheese Toast Spreads.....

I didn't have any Tom's Light Gluten Free Bread Mix on hand as Lea used in her recipe, so I used a box of Gluten-Free Pantry's French Bread and Pizza Mix. The base was a bit, well, pizza-like and probably more chewy than desired. The next time I make this treat I would try a blend of rice flour and corn starch to get it to be a more delicate texture. We brought a batch of this deliciousness to my daughter's softball banquet last night and the Bulldogs (70-2 this year!) polished off the batch, though I did see some of the eclair part left behind in the pan.

The Peanut Butter Boy's Cake Contest continues on through the rest of this month, so you can still have time to whip up something worthy of George Washington Carver's favorite legume and enter in this fun foodie event.