More Fall Inspired Recipe Fun!
Pecan Pie Bars for my boss/friends Birthday.
How few of us are lucky enough that we can call our boss at work a friend? Are you raising your hand? Not many of you are I would imagine. I am lucky that my boss, we'll just call him P, is a great friend of mine. I consider him to be a friend in lots of ways and I feel very fortunate (most days) that he is my boss. I know many people have a boss who they don't like and don't respect. That is not the case with me. I have known P for roughly 5 years of the almost 10 years I've worked at the company. Not all of that time he was my boss, but in the past 3 years or so we've become closer and what I would classify as friends. I even adore his soon to be wife so that's a special added bonus!
What do I do for my friends for their Birthday's? What I do best! That's baking! P's Birthday is today, Friday, September 16th. I know from him telling me previously that his favorite dessert is Pecan Pie. My irrational fear of pie and more specifically rolled crust prevents me from, at this time, making a bonafide Pecan Pie - so I made him the next best thing. Pecan Pie bars from an old recipe found on a glorious website where a lot of the recipes from the old foodie magazine, Gourmet, can be found.
Let's talk for a moment about the original bad boy of the "foodie" magazine. It made the culinary world seem so glamorous! I used to have a subscription to it when it was still being published and would always marvel at the articles, recipes and most notably the photography within. The magazine was eventually replaced on the market by the lesser known Bon Appetit magazine. These days there are so many culinary magazines in the United States it's hard to keep them straight sometimes. I personally maintain subscriptions to Bon Appetit, Food Network Magazine as well as Food & Wine. I will sometimes purchase single issues of Cooks Illustrated and Saveur if the articles within interest me on any particular month. I balance this out with subscriptions to Shape and Fitness. Hey, a girl who loves to cook and bake must, in my opinion, be in shape as well!
So here we go. I've never made these pecan pie bars before you can find the recipes for the crust here and the pecan part here.
The ingredients for the crust are displayed here. It's always fun when I get to use my full sized Cuisinart Food Processor. I do love my Cuisinart!
The crust came together rather nicely and I was able to press it in pretty easily. I put it in the refrigerator for a little while prior to baking it because if it is like any other shortbread the butter needs to be as cold as possible to cook properly to form a flaky crust instead of a brick like crust.
The ingredients for the pecan part are displayed below. You will notice that the recipe calls for 1/3 cup of honey. Typical pecan pie does not contain honey, at least not the recipes I'm used to. I replaced about half of the honey this recipe calls for with light corn syrup. I simply eyeballed it in a 1/3 cup sized measuring utensil.
Combining the ingredients for the pecan topping was very simple. I kept my pot on the stove on low/medium heat so as not to overcook any of the ingredients. The goal being to simply heat to combine the ingredients and then let them bake in the oven.
Working quickly I poured the hot pecan topping onto the hot shortbread crust and then put it in the oven as fast as possible and I waited until it was hot and bubbly and look what we have here!
With a recipe like this you must let the bars cool completely in their pan before cutting them or else they will just fall apart and become a gooey mess. After baking them on Thursday night I allowed them cool uncovered for about 20 minutes and then loosely draped the pan with foil for the remainder of the evening. When I woke up this morning is when I actually cut them into squares.
Don't they look gorgeous! Who doesn't love a Pecan Pie Bar for breakfast? Okay maybe it was a little sweet for breakfast but you didn't honestly think that I wasn't going to at least sample one did you? What they tasted like closely resembled a pecan pie but I found that the pecan pie topping to shortbread crust ratio might have been a little off. I think that I could tweak this recipe and increase the pecan pie topping to a thinner shortbread crust and it would be Pecan Pie Bar perfection!
Here they are, in their tupperware container ready to be gifted to P. I think he liked them, I hope he liked them! Though he did mention something about them possibly causing a diabetic coma.
Until next time which will be soon!
