Fun with puff pastry and a Christmas round up

This Christmas I showed my ability to learn from past mistakes and grow as a person – by which I mean that I didn’t buy my usual six limes and will thus be spared the sad task of having to throw them away towards the end of January. However, I did have a minor aberration in the Tesco aisle where they stocked the fresh ready-rolled all-butter puff pastry ....and ended up with quite a lot of puff pastry. You may not know what it’s like to look in your fridge and wonder “why on earth did I think I would need that much puff pastry?” so let me tell you it’s a mixture of shame tinged with pride at owning so much puff pastry. Having frozen what I could, I was left with several packs so decided to make palmiers.

No recipe needed here as it couldn’t be simpler. Just spread your filling over the pastry; here is the mincemeat version:

Then roll them up from the sides so they meet in the middle and chill them for 30 minutes before slicing. At this point, they don’t look very palmier-like but don’t panic:

When baked they look like fat villainous Victorian moustaches (to bake them, simply follow the instructions on the pastry packet – mine needed about 15 minutes at 180C):

These were such a hit that I repeated the process with nutella, chopped almonds and cinnamon (these were Mr CC’s favourites):

And then – because there was still some pastry to use up, I tried a plainer sugared version. I simply sprinkled caster sugar over the pastry and then egg washed the slices, sprinkling with more sugar (sorry for the rather migraine-inducing photo but I made them in the evening and it was dark, so I needed my kitchen lights on!):

When I get round to tackling my frozen puff pastry mountain there will no doubt be more puff pastry recipes on my site!

Of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without mince pies. I made my usual pies with decorative pastry toppers and if you’d like to see the recipe it can be found here

I also made a Christmas cake with my usual recipe only this year I used a much darker rum which gave it a richer colour (it was overproof rum and gave the flavour a bit of a kick!).

My cake toppers were from Salzburg and are Krampus and St Nicholas. Their bodies are Mozart Balls– the famous chocolate only available in Salzburg. I liked that they were cute and Krampus doesn’t look too evil!

Happy New Year to you all and here’s hoping your 2011 will be filled with exquisite baked goods!