On the baking of pie

[jethrien]

I set out to make a dark chocolate pecan pie last night. I had a new recipe that I'd wanted to try. I also had my mother's recipe for regular pecan pie. They were similar, but the proportions were somewhat different. I decided I would try something in between the two.

I started out with an all-butter crust. Now, I've been experimenting with fats (my basic recipe calls for all shortening). The 2/3 butter, 1/3 shortening came out delightfully stretchy and easy to roll out. (Easy as pie?) Unfortunately, the all butter didn't come out so well. I'm still not sure whether I didn't add enough water or something, and will need further experimenting, but the dough came out on the brittle side. It's the first time I've tried to get a crust into the pan and failed and had to reroll it out in years. So I was behind on my timing already.

One recipe called for 1 cup of corn syrup, the other for a cup and a quarter. But when I poured the corn syrup into the measuring cup, I discovered that I'd seriously overestimated the volume left in the bottle. I had about a quarter cup of corn syrup. Crap.

It was 9:15 at this point, and the pie would take 50 minutes to bake and I wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time. So I didn't just leave to go get more corn syrup.

I though of something clever - pancake syrup is essentially corn syrup, with a little maple flavoring added. Maple and pecans would go just fine together. I grabbed the pancake syrup and dumped that in the measuring cup.

I had a quarter cup of that, too.

So I tried to get creative. I boiled down a brown sugar and water mixture, and stirred in cornstarch to thicken it. It did indeed thicken, but by the time it had boiled down, I had less than a quarter cup of that.

Finally, I remembered I had molasses hidden in the back of the cabinet. I topped it all out with the molasses.

So this is going to be more like a cross between shoofly pie and chocolate pecan pie. Should be interesting.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yup - I think the cake may stand up better.