Sunday, February 3, 2013

Pecan Pie

Rachel decided that she wanted a Pecan Pie for her birthday instead of a cake. Who am I to argue? I've not made one and this seemed like a great excuse.

The main problem I encountered was that corn syrup is rare in Australia. I had to find a recipe that didn't include it; fortunately Stephanie stepped up to the challenge and provided a simple enough one. The use of ¾ of a cup of maple syrup gave me a bit of pause - though some recipes I'd seen used a whole cup. That's an expensive pie!

Filling
  • 140g pecans, roughly chopped
  • ⅓ cup sugar
  • ¾ cup maple syrup
  • juice of 1 lemon
  • 60g butter, melted melted and cooled
  • 3 eggs
  • extra 8 perfect pecan halves

Pastry
  • 225g (1½ cups) plain flour
  • 110g unsalted butter, chilled, chopped
  • iced water (enough for 2-4 tbsp)

Method
  1. Preheat oven to 200°C. Bake pastry as previously in a loose-bottom flan dish.
  2. Reduce oven to 180ÂșC.
  3. Mix all filling ingredients except the 8 pecan halves.
  4. Pour into case and top carefully and elegantly with the 8 halves.
  5. Bake for 25 minutes, until set.
Cool and serve either warm or cold with unsweetened cream.

Notes: A couple of things went wrong. First up I added too much water to the pastry dough. For some reason it just wasn't balling up. This resulted in two things: when I was rolling it out parts of it were quite sticky, and when the shell was blind-baked it shrank considerably on the sides - to about 2/3 of their height. This made pouring the filling in a bit of a problem. Also the sides of the case were patched together where they weren't quite high enough. The resulting cracks let a fair amount of liquid leaking out. Bit of a mess.

Yum!

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