I decided to make mini pecan pie tarts because they bring up fond childhood memories of my mom preparing these tarts for me to share with my kindergarten class and because...they're easy to eat! I went with my mom's recipe for the pie crust and followed a slightly modified Allrecipes recipe for the filling.
To prepare the crust, I mixed 3 oz of softened cream cheese with 1.5 cups flour and 1 stick of softened butter. Once the dough was prepared, I rolled the dough flat and cut out circles of dough to place into my mini muffin pan. I found that after the dough was rolled out once, it was a lot harder to re-knead (to roll out additional circles from the remaining crust), so I only managed to make about 24 mini tarts.
For the filling, I found that I often run into a issue with making my batter slightly lumpy - as if the egg has cooked. In fact, even though I've made the pecan pie filling many many times, I still cannot quite figure out if I've been improperly tempering the egg. I do vaguely recall making this filling in the past without ever running into this lumpy filling issue but...I really don't know. Perhaps I will start taking pictures of this process to reference...which I conveniently forgot to do this time around.
To avoid any possibility of cooking the egg in the melted butter, I whipped the eggs in a separate bowl from the rest of the filling and added the whipped eggs back in after everything (aside from the nuts) have been added in. But I have to admit that even after waiting for the filling to come to room temperature before mixing in the eggs, it STILL looked like I had cooked the eggs in the filling. Maybe I shouldn't have used a stand mixer for this? I still don't know...
The only other modification I made was that I added less sugar - 3/4 cup brown sugar - and slightly more nuts, depending on how runny the filling was looking. After spooning the filling into the tart shells, I popped them into a 350 F oven for 15 minutes.
To prepare the crust, I mixed 3 oz of softened cream cheese with 1.5 cups flour and 1 stick of softened butter. Once the dough was prepared, I rolled the dough flat and cut out circles of dough to place into my mini muffin pan. I found that after the dough was rolled out once, it was a lot harder to re-knead (to roll out additional circles from the remaining crust), so I only managed to make about 24 mini tarts.
For the filling, I found that I often run into a issue with making my batter slightly lumpy - as if the egg has cooked. In fact, even though I've made the pecan pie filling many many times, I still cannot quite figure out if I've been improperly tempering the egg. I do vaguely recall making this filling in the past without ever running into this lumpy filling issue but...I really don't know. Perhaps I will start taking pictures of this process to reference...which I conveniently forgot to do this time around.
To avoid any possibility of cooking the egg in the melted butter, I whipped the eggs in a separate bowl from the rest of the filling and added the whipped eggs back in after everything (aside from the nuts) have been added in. But I have to admit that even after waiting for the filling to come to room temperature before mixing in the eggs, it STILL looked like I had cooked the eggs in the filling. Maybe I shouldn't have used a stand mixer for this? I still don't know...
The only other modification I made was that I added less sugar - 3/4 cup brown sugar - and slightly more nuts, depending on how runny the filling was looking. After spooning the filling into the tart shells, I popped them into a 350 F oven for 15 minutes.
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