Pecan Tarts

Hi everyone, the other day I have made these really amazing pecan tarts that came out very beautiful and astonishing. Personally I'm not a huge fan of pecan tarts, but since everyone else in my lab said that they were delicious I figured I could show everyone how to make them. So here it is a step by step process on how to make pecan tarts.

1. Make sure you gather all your ingredients. To make the dough for the tarts you would need one whole egg, pastry flour, butter, and granulated sugar. You can add your sugar to your egg and mix it with a fork. Make sure your butter is cubed and cold before you proceed with the dough making.

2.  Next you would lay your flour on the surface and lay your butter on top of the flour. Now instead of using the cutting method with your bench scrapper, use your palm of your hand to rub the butter into the flour, this would be called the rubbing method. The rubbing method is to create mealy long flaky dough. Once the butter is rubbed in, create a well into your flour mixture and add little by little of the egg/sugar mixture into the flour/butter mixture and rub in using a bench scrapper until combined into a ball. Once combined wrap the dough ball with plastic wrap and set in the fridge to keep cold until ready to use.

3. When your ready to work with your dough take it out of the fridge and cut it in half. With one half you would be able to make a medium size tart. With the other half you'll be able to make 3 small tarts. Roll out the dough to the thickness of 1/8 of an inch. Once rolled out lay the dough on top of the tart shell ramekin and cut the extra dough around the edges.

4. With the little dough thats off the edge of the circle ramekin carefully fold it in to the round ramekin and press it against the sides using your thumbs. Now using your paring knife make a slanted line along the edge for a creative and nice design. To bake these tarts, we're going to blend bake the crust. Blind bake is when you take plastic wrap and place beans inside the plastic wrap while placing the plastic wrap beans into the tarts. Place the tarts into the oven for about ten minutes until the edge is turning a little golden brown.

5. Once the tart shells are baked, egg wash the bottom of the tart surface. This is so when you bake the pecan pie filling in these tart shells the filling will not make the bottom so moist and will not leak out of the crust. The egg wash act as a barrier (you can make the bottom surface white or dark chocolate and it acts the same way as the egg wash). As you can see in the next picture after the egg washing,  a layer of chopped pecans were layered on the bottom. I mixed together a liquid filling that you can see me pour into the half baked tart shells. This liquid filling is made out of butter, granulated sugar, egg, corn syrup, bourbon, and vanilla extract whisked together.

6.  Next layer your full size pecans on the surface of your tarts and place them in the oven. To make sure they are fully baked you are looking for bubbles along the surface. Once baked and the tarts are fully cooled be careful taking them out of the rings because they could fall apart. 

I would say the final product was all right. I believe I could have done a lot better with the whole tart itself. The larger tart wasn't as nice looking, that is why I only took a picture of the small tarts instead of the larger tart. I wasn't a huge fan of the whole pecans on top. Next time I would of have done the small pecans instead of the whole. Also I'm not a huge fan of pecan tarts or pecan pie. It's one of my least favorite pastries.