A hunting friend with a farm and a sugar shack (a lucky friend) gave us some of his maple syrup, so I decided to make this pie with a cup of it. There are a lot of recipes for maple pecan pie out there—some of them too fussy and time-consuming—but all you really need to do is take your favorite pecan pie recipe and substitute maple syrup for the corn syrup. The resulting pie is really a sugar custard—wow! that doesn’t sound very healthy, but the Easter holiday is surely one of the worst holidays for over-consumption of sugar. I’m taking the pie with us on our holiday trip, so I only plan to have a tiny, tiny slice and leave the rest for the gang. The rest of the sugar feast (peeps and bunnies), for me, will be watching while others do their thing. One of us has to be sober.

Unlike a regular custard pie, which bakes in about 25 minutes, a pecan pie, with all that sugary syrup takes a little longer to set, up to an hour or more depending on the recipe. With that longer time, I don’t worry about the crust being underdone, so it doesn’t need to be prebaked, but I do worry about the crimped edges. I’m unbelievably out of foil, so I have to use a silicone edge cover, which doesn’t work as well as foil; I’m expecting the crust to be more browned than we would like. Better to have realistic expectations.

I’m making a few changes to the recipe in my Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book (1961):

1. substituting 1 cup maple syrup for corn syrup
2. substituting brown sugar for white sugar—which will create a little caramel sweetness with the 1/3 cup butter
3. adding both chopped and whole pecan halves for a nuttier texture and flavor
4. adding 1 teaspoon vanilla

Syrup, butter, brown sugar, and eggs

chopped and whole nuts

Filling with chopped nuts

Halves set on top

The pie!