BB: Frozen Pecan Tart

Baked 11/25/14

My pie contribution to the Thanksgiving pie collection was this one from the Baking Bible, intended to be served frozen. It's a pâte sucrée (sweet cookie tart crust) with a riff on pecan pie filling...and a lot less of the filling to the amount of pecans. That's all to the good for me, as the thicker traditional pecan pie is something I can only take in very small slices. The ratio here is much more to my liking.

I struggled with the crust, despite the promising technique of laying the rolled-out crust over an 8-inch cake pan to help shape it, then placing the 9.5-inch tart pan on top and flipping it all together before finishing the easing of the crust into the pan. All that seems to go fine, but my bad luck(?) (poor skills? who knows!) with blind-baking continue, and my baked crust had cracks all over. I patched a few with scraps of unbaked dough when the pie weights came out, but still had cracks most of the way around the sides and some in the middle. I painted a lot of them with dark chocolate (knowing I planned to do a chocolate drizzle), but still had a lot of leakage of the filling. It made getting the tart off the tart pan base rather....challenging.

After the pie cooled and was detached from the pan and base, it got a chocolate lace topping (a drizzle of ganache, that is) before being frozen. It was fine served frozen though the flavors weren't pronounced, and I wonder if it would do as well or better at room temperature. Still, it was very nice to have this pie all prepared and out of the way, just needing to be pulled out and sliced before dessert.

I didn't get much feedback from the rest of the family beyond "it was very good"--our Thanksgiving pie race is always won by the Black Bottom Pie, and this year was no exception. The rest, even a Frozen Pecan Tart from Rose, just become "the other pies", I'm afraid.