What do you get when you combine mixed roasted nuts and a milk caramel filling made with sweetened condensed milk and some eggs, and you place it inside a sweet shortcrust pastry pie shell ? You get this amazing autumn tart (or pie) !

You have the recipe & instructions for the sweet shortcrust pastry pie-shell because I posted that too this weekend and at the same time, (see it here) so there’s no excuse not to fill up that pre-baked pie/tart shell up with all this roasted, nutty, creamy, caramelized “goodness”.

Here’s my amateur theory on the proportions and ratios. Its 1:1:1,5 or 375 grams roasted nuts + 375 grams pie shell + 565 grams (approximately 1 ½ x 375) milk caramel filling to hold it all together.

The raw nuts are first placed inside the pie tin until full, so you can figure out how much you’ll need and then they’re roasted.

The creamy part of the filling is there to sweeten it up and to fill up all the gaps between the whole nuts and hold it all together and it needs to be at least 1 ½ times as much (in weight, not in volume) compared to the nuts, because caramel is much denser and heavier than nuts or even water.

The filling is quite simple to make. You need to create a milk caramel or “dulche de leche” spread by gently boiling a still closed small can of sweetened condensed milk and once that all thickens up, darkens and cools down, you’ll open it up and add the eggs (I use 2 whole eggs and the remaining egg white from making the shortcrust pie shell), I add just a bit of extra icing sugar and some cornstarch (as a guarantee that it will all hold together and be firm enough), whisk it all up until smooth, add the roasted nuts and fill up your pie shell right up to the edge and bake.

Yup, that’s it.

Enjoy your weekend and see you all in 2 weeks because I’ll be really too busy with work to post anything but then again, there’s nothing wrong with “missing me” a little bit, right ?! . . . :)