Pecan pie

So Sunday is my new standard bake day, and last Sunday I attempted to face my old nemesis: sweet pastry (or actually: pastry in general, be it sweet, short, crumbly, or any of the other 3 varieties I have not yet attempted). I decided to bake Mary Berry's pecan pie. This choice may have been inspired by the fact that it let me buy maple syrup, something I completely fell in love with while we were in the US last summer, but which is very very expensive.

Mary's recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:
175g plain flour
15g icing sugar
75g butter
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon cold water

25g butter
175g light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
200ml maple syrup
150g pecan halves (or less, if they're as absurdly expensive as they are here)

You make the sweet pastry by mixing the flour and icing sugar and then rubbing in the butter with your fingers until the 'fine breadcrumbs' stage. You then add the egg and water and 'quickly' knead it to form a firm dough. Wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for 30 minutes.
(It's these magical stages that determine whether your sweet pastry works or doesn't work: you should work the pastry too much, and it should be chilled properly.)

Take your pastry out again, role into a circle on a flat, lightly floured surface and then put into a lose-bottomed fluted flan tin. Of course, my pastry broke all over the place, so I had to assemble the bits in the flan tin. This does not really matter, your pastry will still come out good. Prick all over with a fork.
Scrunch up a bit of baking parchment, unscrunch and put into the pastry casting with baking beans to hold it down. Blind bake for 10 minutes at 200 C and then bake without the paper for another 5 minutes.

Now after the blind baking, my pastry looked great, but after the 'real' bake something was terribly wrong: there was a Grand Canyonesque ridge running through my casing, separating one bit of the pastry from the other. Now as the filling was going to be pourable, this would mean everything would run out of the bottom and into the oven. As the filling consisted mainly of sugary things, I did not think this was such a good idea. I therefore quickly mixed another small bit of pastry and used that to patch up the gaping gap.

On to the filling: mix the butter and sugar together, and then add the maple syrup and eggs, beating well. Pour the filling into the casing and arrange the pecan halves on top (Mary tells you to do it the other way around, but that makes no sense to me, as pouring in the mixture will result in all the pecan nuts flowing to one side). Bake at 180C for 30 minutes, and leave to cool.

Pie in the oven: notice the light colour of the maple syrup mixture.

I baked my flan tin inside another baking tray, which was a good idea, as my patch up job did not work. Upon returning to the pie after 20 minutes of baking, it was bathing nicely in a whole sea of bubbly, melty sugar. When the pie was done I very quickly detached it from the baking tray and set to scrubbing said tray for about 15 minutes until all the blackened sugar had come off. The same will have to be done for the flan tin (the top part of which I could only extract from the pastry casing with great difficulty), but as that is not something we use almost every other day, I could not really be bothered to get into that quickly. Anyway, it came out mostly in 1 piece, with some additional pastry bits to nibble on.

Darker pie, with a cracked pastry casing. Still tasted great!

Now the thing I had not mentioned about this pie is that it is American. Very American. Meaning that it has more calories than a normal person will eat in a couple of days, possibly even a week. So make sure to make the portions of the pie very very very small when serving (about 1 pecan width), or people will go 'I'm full!' with more than half of their piece left over, which would be a shame, because it really is a very very nice pie. It tasted very good, not too sweet, not too sticky.

It did nothing to resolve my fear of pastry, however, so I will have to try something else. I'm thinking about maybe doing some choux pastry, which is even more difficult but will be very rewarding when it goes well, but maybe that's a bit too ambitious. For now, we still have more than half a pie waiting in the fridge, so we'll get through the cold days nicely.

175g (6oz) plain flour
15g (½oz) icing sugar
75g (3oz) diced butter
1 large egg yolk

for the filling

25g (1oz) butter, softened
175g (6oz) light muscovado sugar
3 large eggs
200ml (7fl oz) maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g (5oz) pecan halves - See more at: