Pretty Girl Bakery

This week’s recipe Twofer Pie was chosen by Vibi of La casserole carrée, and can be found on page 321 of Baking:  From My Home to Yours. It’s the love child of pumpkin and pecan pie and I personally would rather call it Pumpcan Pie. I thought this was delicious.  I don’t think I’d substitute it in for pumpkin pie and you’d be hard pressed to find me making a pecan pie on my own accord, but this was snazzy. I made little tartlets using my cupcake pan.  And I’ll admit I just used a storebought crust.  Things here have been crazy and I just didn’t want to mess with crust. I used a three inch circle cutter to cut out the dough and then I pressed it in, filled and put them in the oven.  I did 10 minutes at 450 and then 20 at 300.  It could have used another 10 minutes at 300 because the filling is very wet and not firm but I don’t really think anyone can tell. hah! And now I am very tired from a long week so I’m calling it quits.  Enjoy the picture and I hope you enjoyed your pie!  HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

About three weeks ago J’s mom was in town and J was making pad thai for dinner.  I wanted to make a nice dessert to go along with it and I had all of the ingredients since my caramel peanut brownie disaster, and thought that this would be nice after a spicy peanutty dish. I adored the picture of the tart of page 356 and I had just bought a 9 inch tart pan at IKEA a few weeks back so when I got home early that day I broke out my bake box and got started.  Dorie recommends using the Sweet Tart Dough of page 444 and it was buttery and delicious. If you make this you need to make sure to definitely bake it until it’s done. I think mine took about 40-45 to bake and get the edges slightly crisp.  In her recipe for the caramel she says to add the butter after the caramel comes to a deep amber color but I found that by the time mine got to that point it already tasted a little bitter and I still needed to cook it longer to add the butter and the cream. I should have added the butter and cream when the caramel reached a warm amber color.  I found the caramel tasted like those Werther’s candies at that stage.  My other suggestion for making this is to not add the peanuts to the caramel but rather spread the caramel and then sprinkle the peanuts on top before pouring the ganache.  It makes it very easy to spread instead of getting the spatula hung up on clumps of peanuts.  The next time I make this I’d use semi-sweet instead of bittersweet chocolate, and add macadamia nuts instead of the peanuts.