I signed up to bring a dessert to Wednesday night dinner tonight, and decided I wanted to bake pecan pies. My friend Jamie sells pecans as some sort of fundraiser for whatever one does with one’s sorority as an alumni. I had the bag I bought from her this year sitting in my baking cupboard and decided I would use it to bake some pies. In the past I have had awful luck trying to bake pies with a butter crust. I can never get the dough to cohere properly and wind up overworking it. The last butter crust I tried was so bad it was really inedible. I have never had these problems with a shortening crust, so I usually stick to that. I thought I had shortening on hand for last night, but turns out the can I had was many years out of date so I was afraid to use it. I had a tiny bit left from an opened can that wasn’t enough to make 2 pie crusts, but was enough to use this recipe that called for both shortening and butter. I thought maybe having a recipe that used a little shortening would help out. I’m not so sure it did. I was wary of the way the crusts were when I put them in the pie plates. I haven’t tried the pies yet, so hopefully things turned out better than I think they did. People can just eat the topping off the crust if it’s too horrible I guess.

I used the basic Karo corn syrup recipe for the actual pie filling with half dark corn syrup and half light. They look and smell delicious so hopefully they will taste that way as well. 

And of course I couldn’t leave this post without somehow tying these pies into some pop culture references. It is of course required to pronounce pecan pie like they do in this scene of When Harry Met Sally.

And of course I can’t bake a pie without singing Patty Griffin’s “Making Pies” in my head while I do it.

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