Sugar, ah Honey Honey

I have very mixed feelings about spring.  Don't get me wrong, I love that winter is finally leaving (hopefully), but I hate the early stages of spring.  You know, when everything is a drab shade of brown and you can see all the garbage that the snow has been so cleverly hiding all winter.  I do however love the later stages of spring when all the trees are starting to bud and the world turns from brown to green. 

My mixed feelings about spring are mirrored in my feelings about maple syrup.  A few years ago Jason and his dad and brother started to make their own maple syrup.  I hate it!  To clarify, I hate the process but I love the end result.  Just as the weather starts to change they head out to the woods and tap the maple trees and to start collecting the sap.  Then they head back into the woods daily to empy the buckets of sap.  Once the sap is collected they spend entire weekends boiling it down into syrup.  This is the part that I hate.  I really have no reason to complain as I don't really do any of the work, I just reap the benefits.  I hate that the process is always much longer than they think it will be and it takes Jason away from home for an entire weekend.  I'm also not a fan of the various empty glass bottles that accumulate around the house every year that Jason insists on keeping because they would be great for syrup.  I know I shouldn't complain and that there are much worse things they could be doing with their time but I just can't help myself.  As much as I hate the process I love the suppy of syrup that we end up with to get us through the year. 

Because they split the syrup between the three guys, we always end up with more than the two of us can ever go through in a year.  After giving some away to my family and our friends we are still left with way more than we could ever use.  As I usually do when faced with an abundance of something I decided to figure out some ways to integrate maple syrup into something more than a topper for waffles and pancakes.  For a brief moment I comtemplated just chugging it like in the movie Elf but then I figured that only elfs or people that play them in the movies could get away with that.  So I decided to get creative and find some uses for syrup that go beyond the breakfast table.

When I asked Jason what he wanted for a dessert yesterday he said pie.  He didn't care what type, just pie.  I'm very lucky that he's not picky so I can pretty much make what I want and he will always be willing to try it at least once.  I thought about the usual pies, pumpkin, berry or apple but then on my way to wok it dawned on me that I could probably find a recipe for some type of pie that used maple syrup.  Thanks to my trusty iphone and its wonderful epicurious app I was able to find a maple pie recipe in no time.  I even bought some new treats at work to make my pie fancier; a maple leaf cookie cutter to make a decorative crust and a nifty little gadget called a first pie slice.  This thing is great, it gets set in the pie plan and you put the crust over the top and bake the pie with this metal slice underneath.

I made an old standby crust recipe from my favorite Betty Crocker cookbook and rolled out enough for the pie pan and a bit extra so I could cut some maple leaves for the crust. (I forgot to take pictures of this one until the pie was already done).  Then I put my first pie slice in place and added the crust to the pan. 

The filling was super easy and only took a couple minutes to put together.  I whisked 2 room temp eggs with 1 1/2 cups of packed brown sugar (if only I would have had maple sugar it would have been even better) once that was mixed together I added 1/2 cup of cream, 1/3 cup of maple syrup and 2 teaspoons of melted butter.  This is where the recipe I found stopped, but I decided to amp it up a bit and I added some chopped macademia nuts to add a little contrast in texture and to cut the sweetness a bit.  Once the nuts were incorporated in the filling I added it to the crust. I brushed the crust with egg whites and added some of my cut out maple leaves to the edge and brushed some more egg white on top so it would get nice and golden in the oven.

I baked the pie at 350 for about 50 minutes (until the top had formed a crust but there was still a little jiggle in the middle).  Then the pie needs to cool so it sets up in the middle and you don't end up with a soupy mess when you try to cut into it.

Waiting is the hardest part. . .

While we waited for the pie to cool we made dinner.  We stuffed the last of Jason's trout he caught in Canada and baked it.  Normally we grill trout but we decided to try something different this time.  In the future we'll go back to grilling, it was still good but not the same as it usually is.  I could just live on fish and starch so I would have been fine with just some bread to go with it but Jason likes a vegetable with his meals so I decided to bring the syrup into dinner too and glaze some baby carrots with it.  Yum!!

Once we polished off the carrots and all the trout we could stomach (and after a little digesting time) it was time for pie.  I cut along the sides of my first pie slice and pulled it out.  This allowed the slice to come out perfectly intact, not a broken mess like normally happens when trying to remove the first slice of pie.  I topped the pie with a little whipped cream (the recipe called for creme fraiche but I have yet to find that in Green Bay) and we dug in.  I am not normally a sweet eater but I have to say this pie was excellent.  Light flaky crust and a melt in your mouth filling with just the right combination of salty and sweet.  I don't often make the same thing twice but I have a feeling with all the syrup that my Honey made this year I will be repeating this recipe in the future.