I tested a low carb pumpkin pie recipe last night. Tasty and awesome, it will make my Thanksgiving Day menu.

I love baking. Putting my hands in the dough, turning raw ingredients into something else. It’s pure joy. Unfortunately, when I went low carb, I thought my newfound hobby was lost. Key ingredients – flour, sugar – are not friendly to my waistline. Thankfully, there are more alternative ingredients, sites and cookbooks popping up that focus on low carb baking.

One such site, The Low Carb Diet, is pretty frickin’ awesome. The site isn’t just for bakers. There are lots of low carb recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, side dishes and desserts.

Mix together a few spices, 0 carb sweetener, cream, eggs, pumpkin and poof! Your basic pumpkin pie filling is ready for the crust!

I came across the Low Carb Pumpkin Pie recipe that I just had to try. With the holiday’s fast approaching, I was on the hunt for some dessert recipes for Thanksgiving. I decided to test out this blog’s pumpkin pie last night. At 6g of carbs per slice, it was a pie I had to make. If it tasted good, then I’d make it for Turkey Day.

It turned out awesome. I just need to do some minor tweaking in my prep work, but the recipe is great.

I’m not posting the recipe here. Just follow the link to The Low Carb Diet’s site. And while visiting, checkout the other recipes. You won’t regret it.

Below I’ve included some photos and list some minor challenges I encountered.

My pie pan was too large for the recipe so I didn’t have enough crust to take to the top of the pan. I won’t make the same boo-boo on Thanksgiving.

Low Carb Pumpkin Pie
Net Carbs: 6.38g
Weight Watchers Points Plus: 10
Serving Size: 1 slice (total recipe makes 8 servings)
Dish Breakdown: 369 Calories/33.38g Fat/10.63g Protein/12.26g Carbs/5.88g Fiber

This pie is worth all 6g of net carbs. But for my Weight Watcher peeps who are not low carb, the 10 points is pretty steep. You can easily tweak the recipe to make it more WW friendly while keeping it tasty.

Or you can do what I do – up your carb count to 50g and dip heavily into the 49 weekly allowance points on Thanksgiving Day. It keeps the guilt at bay if you plan for it.

Crust Challenges
Rather than using wheat flour as the base for the dough, this recipe calls for almond flour. Almond flour is ground from whole, blanched almonds. Almonds are a great source of protein and very low carb – perfect for this carb cutter.

The crust for this recipe is so much easier to make than traditional dough. Just add the ingredients into a bowl and mix. No need for a pastry blender, cold water, refrigeration, or rolling pin. Yep, it’s that easy.

The almond flour crust had more of a graham cracker consistency than flaky crust. And it was delicious!

I had 3 challenges with the dough — all of which I can easily remedy by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.

My oven isn’t very good, cooking my pie crust a little too fast. I need pie crust covers to remedy this problem before Turkey Day.

My first and biggest challenge: My nails. They are a quarter-inch longer than normal (I’m overdue for my manicure). When Thanksgiving rolls around, I need to make sure my nails are as short as possible. Why?

Unlike traditional dough, to form the almond dough by pressing it into your pie pan with your fingers. I ended up scooping chunks of dough under my nails. I was so frustrated. My goal changed from patting out a nice, even dough to just getting it done as fast as possible. So of course the crust in some areas was either too thick or thin. Ugh! It still tasted great, but I want a more even crust next time.

The second challenge – the recipe calls for a 9-inch pie pan. The only thing available was my 10-inch ceramic pie pan. That means I didn’t have enough dough to go all the way up the sides of the pan. Sigh! As a result, I didn’t use all of my pie filling either. I won’t make that mistake again.

My last challenge?  The crust cooked too fast. I covered the edge with tin foil about 30 minutes into the baking. It still came out too dark (everything under the pumpkin filling tasted amazing). This is a typical problem with my pies – the edge of the crust cooking too fast. I really need to break down and just buy a pie crust shield.

Overall, the recipe is very easy to make. Just 5 ingredients for the crust and a few more for the filling. It took me about 15 minutes to mix everything and another 70 minutes to bake the pie.

Letting it cool completely before digging in – that’s the hard part, but it’s so worth the wait.