Pecan Tarts

Making pecan tarts has become a family holiday tradition for us.  My mom and two of my sisters take turns making them.  They're very tedious to make and over the years my Mom and sisters developed ways to speed up the process.  For instance, they use tortilla press to flatten the dough so it's even when you lay it on the baking tray.  In recent years, they've resorted to using mini muffin trays instead of the individual molds to bake the tarts.  Easy clean up and you get more uniform products.

They still chop the pecans by hand.  Manually chopping ten pounds or more of pecans seems so much work for me that's why I never got in the making pecans rotation.  Maybe in another ten years they'll get on the food processor band wagon.  LOL!!

I'm not allowed to post the recipe but I can tell you the ingredients.  Pecans, eggs, butter, vanilla, sugar, flour and cream cheese.  I think everyone love these pecan tarts because not only do they taste really good, they somehow remind people of something their "grandma used to make".  I've heard people say that so many times.

Start by chopping the pecans.  Then cook the filling.  While the filling is cooling off, you work on the dough.  Form little round balls when the dough is ready.  Flatten the balls and place them into the molds or muffin trays.  Fill the molds with the filling and bake.  This is what you get.

Once they're cool, we wrap them individually.  This is the process where I usually get involved.  And I get to taste test, yummy!  We sprinkle powdered sugar over them so they don't stick to the wrapper.

We use some kind of pastry wrapper cut to size.

Once they're all wrapped, we packaged them in clear bags and they're ready to give away.

I added tags to mine to give to the CCD teachers at church.  Remember the special tags from another post? The tags include the ingredients list in case people have food allergies.

Every year we have a family white elephant gift exchange on Christmas day.  My sister Ida and I came up with a gag gift to exchange on Christmas day.  She took an unused lunch box and filled it with pecan tarts but the twist is the addition of the diet tea, my idea.  We have relatives who count on us to bring pecan tarts every year and there won't be any this year unless they get the gag gift.

It'll be interesting to see if this gift will get pass around.  Our while elephant rule is you can "steal" the gift up to three times.

That's the pecan tart saga this year folks.  I thank you for stopping by.  Christmas is just a few hours away.

Until the next post ................ Cheers!!!

irene