I Bake For Attention: Individual Pecan Pies

I’m a bit late for Thanksgiving, but I had to give these bad boys a whirl. A pretty simple recipe, with a few adaptions. I suppose I feel I have the licence to do this because this recipe isn’t a part of my culture, so I don’t really have any expectations. That’s my excuse for potentially bastardising the beloved North American dessert, anyway. The dough isn’t overly sweet to make up for the sweetness of the filling. And these are totally, absolutely delicious.

Having never had one before, I have no idea what they are meant to taste like. But whatever I made tasted awesome.

Makes about 8 mini pies

Ingredients for Pastry (from the Joy of Baking Pecan Pie recipe)

175g plain flour
½ tsp salt
1tbsp vanilla sugar
110g butter
30-60 ml ice cold water

Filling, adapted from the BBC Good Food recipe

75g butter
75g golden syrup
150g brown sugar
1tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp rum/bourbon (optional!)
2 free range eggs, beaten
150g pecans

Method

Place the dry ingredients into a food processor and quickly blitz to get rid of lumps.

Add in the cubed butter.

Give it another whizz until a coarse sandy texture develops. Slowly add in 30ml of water, adding in more slowly if needed. I only used about 40ml total to get the consistency right.

Form into a disc and cover with clingfilm. Put in fridge to chill for 30-60 minutes.

Meanwhile, get on with the filling recipe. Place the butter, syrup, sugar, cinnamon and rum in a pan and gently heat. Once the butter is melted, take off the heat and stir until smooth.

Leave to cool for 10 or so minutes until lukewarm. Beat the eggs and add them to the syrup mixture.

While I am waiting for the mixture to become cool I normally get cracking on the pastry cases. Preheat the oven to 180 Celsius. Take the pastry dough out of the fridge and place on a lightly floured surface. Roll out (from the centre outwards).

My trusty rolling pin and tray

Cut out large circles (about 2 cm wider all around than your pastry cases). Gently transfer to the metal pastry cases and trim off any excess pastry.

Blind bake for 15 minutes. You do this by placing greaseproof paper in the cases and filling it with something like lentils/rice/dried beans.

My black turtle beans

I swear, when I was making this today I reached for my nearest “bean” and got as far as OPENING A PACKET OF POPCORN KERNELS before I realised my grave error. I used black turtle beans because I have 3kg of them to use up anyway. They can be reused for blind baking, so I always save what I used. Frugal!

Once out of the oven from their blind baking, place 4-5 pecans in each.