It’s been a looooooong long while since I last posted, I know. Life just became a bit more complicated in the past few months.
We were supposed to have my sister take care of my baby girl for 6 months, which fell through and put us all in a swirl of hectic searches for a daycare and then from daycare the road to every. single. sickness was very short. So I spent a lot of time at home with a sick child trying to juggle everything else around me, and THAT was hard!
So you’ll have to excuse me for being MIA lately, I’ve been simply trying to survive. And when I’m on survival mode I’m not only lacking time, I also lack inspiration. Add the grim wintery scenery outside my winter and you got yourself a perfectly good reason to have zero time to blog, right?
But anyways, I’m trying to get back on my feet now and lately celebrated my son’s birthday. But of course, there’s never just an ordinary cake.
He was born on Pi day (March 14th) which only made perfectly good sense when he asked me for a PIE for his birthday. I agreed and told him to choose one; the winner was Pecan Pie.
Now I have to admit, I’ve never made pecan pie. Never had to. So this whole thing was new to me.
A quick search on Google gave me quite a few recipes but every single one of them had a major problem, they all had corn syrup in them.
Why? why use this highly processed, super unhealthy ingredient in a perfectly good pecan pie?
I searched and searched and finally shared my frustration with my husband, who very quickly solved my problem; “they use corn syrup to thicken the pecan mix and glue it all together, just use something that could do that”. YES – why didn’t I think of that? oh yeah…did I mention I’m just getting back on the horse of inspiration? 🙂 so I played around with some recipes and finally got it! The perfect, easy, delicious Maple Pecan Pie.
Using maple and NOT corn syrup, making the pie dough from scratch and NOT having to refrigerate for a few hours. It all turned out so so easy to make. And needless to say my son was very pleased. So was I and so was everyone else, who devoured the pie within the next 24 hours.
So worth it!
- 100gr Cold Butter - Grated or cut into small pieces for easy mixing
- ¾ Cup Powdered Sugar
- 1 Egg
- 300gr All Purpose Flour
- 1-2 Tbsp Cold Water (Optional)
- ½ Cup + 2 Tbsp Maple Syrup
- ½ Cup Brown Sugar
- 50gr Butter
- 1 Egg
- 150gr Pecans - Broken in half or quarters
- 1 Tbsp Milk
- Mix all the crust ingredients in a stand mixer on medium speed. If the dough comes out too crumbly, slowly ad in 1 Tbsp cold water and add more if required until you get a soft non sticky ball of dough.
- Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and place in the fridge while you make the filling.
- Over medium-low heat, heat the maple, sugar and butter until it melts and you get a nice even brown liquid.
- Beat the egg with the milk and add slowly to the maple mix while stirring.
- Add in the pecans and mix until they are covered. Set aside.
- Remove the dough from the fridge and preheat oven to 375F/190C.
- Grease the pie pan with butter and dust with flour.
- Flatten the dough using a rolling pin and place on the pie pan, cutting off the extra dough on the edges to fit into the pan.
- Poke the dough with fork on the bottom and cover with foil.
- On the foil, place enough dry beans (or other legumes) to create enough weight to hold the dough down from puffing in the oven.
- Bake for about 15 minutes until the dough is starting to become light brown (it doesn't need to be fully baked).
- Remove from oven and remove foil and legumes. Instead, pour in the filling.
- Bake additional 15-20 minutes until the filling solidifies a bit.
- Remove from oven and let cool completely before serving.
