Recipe: Teatime Tassies

I've only made these cute little pecan tarts twice, and they're already my favorite dessert recipe ever. Know why? Because I've only made them twice and I've already memorized the recipe. Also, it's amazing how much inattention on the part of the baker they will tolerate! Though I nicked the recipe from a friend's grandmother, you can find it listed as "Teatime Tassies", "Pecan Tassies", "Pecan Tartlets", etc. in just about any older Southern cookbook worth its butter. I had never encountered the word 'tassie' before this recipe, but it's just the Scots form of French tasse, cup. Now you know, too. As the other half of the title suggests, these are indeed delicious with tea, which helps cut their sweetness.

TEATIME TASSIES

Total prep time: 1 - 1.5 hrs, depending on how many people you have helping, how good they are at helping, and whether or not you left time to soften the butter and chill the pastry.

Qty: 2(4) dozen tartlets, to serve 12-24 people. They're very rich and most people will only eat one or two, but if you want leftovers or there are teen- or college-age boys involved you should probably go ahead and double the recipe anyway. Really.

These will go faster than you think.

PASTRY
1/2 cup/4 oz (1 cup/8 oz) cream cheese
1/2 cup (1 cup) butter or margarine
1 (2) cup(s) flour

FILLING
1(2) egg(s)
1(2) tbsp(s) butter or margarine
3/4(1 1/2) cup(s) brown sugar
1(2) tsp(s) vanilla extract
Dash of salt
2/3(1 1/3) cup(s) pecans

Put the cream cheese and butter out to soften, preferably somewhere the cat can't get to them. Write a few paragraphs on your language history paper. Come back and poke the butter. If your finger leaves a dent, great. If it doesn't or you skipped what I said about the paper, don't worry; the only thing softening really does for this recipe is make it easier for you to combine them later.

Cut the butter into pieces, dump the butter and cream cheese into a bowl, and mash them up with a fork until they're one big light yellow glob. Try not to think about how you are, at this point, basically handling an enormous ball of delicious milkfat, most of which will shortly head straight for your waistline. Add some more people to your guest list and cut the flour into the butter-cheese mixture - this is cooking-speak for "carry on with the fork-mashing until you have a solid ball again." Scrape it all off the inside of the bowl, squish it together with your hands, and stick it in the fridge.

At this point, you can either leave the dough alone to chill for a while, or you can jump right into making the filling. Cut up the butter and set it aside to soften a bit, then crack and beat the egg. You can be fancy and use a whisk, but the fork you were just mashing with is fine. (Wipe the dough off first, though.) Dump in the sugar, butter pieces, vanilla, and salt and stir them all together. Chop the pecans into whatever size pieces you would be fine with seeing sticking out the top of your pastry and dump them in too.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Take the dough out of the fridge (or wherever you set it down) and cut it in half. Cut the halves in half again, and...you see the pattern. Keep going until you have a size you feel comfortable tearing into the number of pieces you need out of that particular chunk. Just to make sure, roll  them all into little balls between the palms of your hands and drop each one into one of the cups in the tin. This is another great reason to make sure you're all doing them at once.

Should look kind of like this. Pretend I actually made those into balls of dough.

Using your fingers and thumb, smooth the balls of dough into mini pastry shells along the contours of the cups. This is easier demonstrated than described (see photo above), but once you make a few batches you should get the hang of it. Just make sure the bottom of the cup isn't too thick or thin, or the filling will either leak or be all pastry and no pecan, and don't slope the tops of the cups away to nothing or your filling won't stay in right. Drop about a teaspoon of filling into each cup and wipe up allllllll the drips. Trust me: you don't want to be scrubbing burned sugar off that pan later.

If you have a bunch of filling left over, don't panic: your cups were just probably a bit too shallow, but they'll still be delicious. And chances are, at least one of your friends or family members likes sugar too much to be worried about salmonella and will happily eat the filling as it is. Stick the pan in the oven, set a 25 minute timer, then clean up the kitchen and check on the tartlets nervously:

Reward yourself by browsing photos online for a face-claim for your newest RP character. When the timer goes off (you DID remember to set the timer, right?), take them out and let them cool - again, preferably somewhere the cat can't get to them. Once they're cool, they should pop right out of the pan, but if not, loosen them up a little with the butter knife. Stick them into paper cups and take pictures because of how cute they are, then quickly put them away where you can't eat them all by yourself at once.

Enjoy!

--Veronica--