Pecan Pie Tartlets

Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving! Yippee! It’s one of my favorite days of the year. Like a lot of people, I am busy baking all day today. We’ve got 26 people coming to dinner, which means by my dessert-to-guest ratio, I need about 10 kinds of dessert! One of the desserts I made is pecan tartlets. I just pulled them out of the oven.

The recipe I use for pecan tartlets comes from King Arthur Flour. I follow it pretty closely, only rather than use a hamburger bun pan or a mini muffin tin as the recipe suggested, I like to use either my Nordic Ware Tartlet pan (which I’ve mentioned in many different blog posts over the past year) or individual-sized tartlet tins.

What I like about this recipe is that is uses Lyle’s Golden Syrup, instead of the more traditional corn syrup. This adds a lot of flavor.

Here’s the recipe, in case you’d like to try it:

PECAN PIE TARTLETTES

Crust:
2 ¼ cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
5 T. unsalted butter
2/3 cup Crisco or other shortening, chilled in freezer
5-6 T. cold water

Sift flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Using your fingers or a pastry blender, cut in shortening until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Sprinkle water on top of flour mixture, one tablespoon at a time. After each sprinkling of water, gently mix in the water drops with some of the dry mixture. After 5 tablespoons of water has been sprinkled in, the mixture should hold together in a ball. If it doesn't, sprinkle an additional tablespoon of water onto the dough. Roll out and press into tartlet pans. Refrigerate until ready to fill.

Filling:
6 large eggs
1 ½ cups Lyle’s Golden Syrup (a sugar cane syrup made in the U.K., but available in many specialty food stores in the U.S. and online from Amazon.com)
2 cups granulated sugar
6 T. melted butter
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups unsalted, raw pecans, slightly chopped

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a medium-sized bowl, beat the eggs, syrup, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla together. Spoon around 1/8 cup of filling into each tartlet cavity. Sprinkle pecans over the filling, dividing them evenly. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. Then reduce the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake for another 15-20 minutes (until filling is set). Remove from pans and cool on rack before serving. Makes 36-48 tartlets.

Happy baking…and eating!
~Becky