Maple “Pecan” Pie

For a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, one of our guests and my son requested a pecan pie. I was very happy to oblige, but through a series of oversights and senior moments, the desserts for this long weekend did not turn out as planned.

I used recipes from the Duchess Bake Shop cookbook, a celebrated Edmonton bakery. The pie crust uses a half-half blend of vegetable shortening and butter and one recipe makes three pie shells worth. It’s very soft and greasy so definitely chill it thoroughly. After blind baking, my first crust shrunk quite a bit, so make sure to roll it out thin and as large as possible.

When it came time to making the filling, one thing that stands out about this recipe is the use of maple syrup, sour cream, and all-purpose flour. The yield is quite generous and due to my shrunken crust, I didn’t need all of it, but I did save the remainder. When it came time to adding the pecans, I couldn’t find any, so I substituted some Ontario-grown hazelnuts from Grimo Nut Nursery, which we visited on a trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake earlier this summer.

On Sunday, I made another pie, rolling the crust larger to make a taller, baked shell, adding the leftover filling from the day before. In my haste to get this into the oven, I forgot the nuts! With the top almost fully set, I dumped a blend of walnuts and heartnuts on the molten filling and hoped for the best.

Even both of these maple “pecan” pies contained none of the namesake nuts, these were still very delicious pies. The texture is perhaps the most unusual: not firm, not custardy, not pasty not smooth, but somewhere in the intersection of those textures. Highly recommend.

P.S. The best part is that I found pecans in the fridge downstairs the next day!