lifeisazoobiscuit

When I decided to serve puff pastry twirls with my milk tart cups (this link will take you to my milk tart recipe) within the 1.5 hour Dinner Divas timeframe I immediately phoned my friend Nina and asked her for her advice. She guided me to her pastry recipe that she has successfully used for many years … but this pastry needed to stand overnight in the fridge – and I just did not have that sort of time available to me. I just thought to myself why not just experiment with the recipe? I eventually got it right and with a few tweaks in the method I could prepare this in the allotted time allowed … and fortunately this pastry turned out to be a winner. You can make the pastry twirls from start to finish in less than 1.5h and it’s perfect. And as Nina mentioned … make a lot of it because it freezes very well.

Serves: 6
Preparation: 10 minutes
Standing time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Ingredients

Rough Puff Pastry
275g Cake flour
Pinch of salt
2.5 ml Cream of Tartar
250g Butter at room temperature – cut the butter into small blocks
125 ml Boiling water

Extra cake flour for rolling out the dough
Spray and Cook

Egg Wash
1 Small egg
1T Full-Cream milk
Mix together

Cinnamon Sugar Mixture
50ml Sugar
5ml Ground cinnamon
Mix these two ingredients together

Method

1. Place a baking tray in the freezer and pre-heat your oven to 200°C.
2. Mix the flour, salt and Cream of Tartar together.
3. In a separate bowl, put in your butter cubes, pour boiling water over the cubes and stir with a fork until there are about a 1/3 of the butter blocks left.
4. Add the flour mixture to the butter.
5. Mix well – but don’t over mix.
6. Pour this mixture into baking tray and spread the mixture out with a spatula, then leave in the freezer for 20 min – thereafter transfer it to the fridge until you need it.
7. Spray another baking tray with Spray and Cook.
8. Take half of the dough out of fridge, sprinkle some Sasko flour onto your work surface and roll the dough out flat with a rolling-pin to approximately 2mm in thickness.
9. Cut the flat pastry into long strips of about 1.5cm in diameter.
10. Brush the pastry strips with the egg wash.
11. Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar mixture.
12. Twist each strip into a straw-like twirl and place on baking tray and bake for approximately 15-20 minutes – until cooked and golden brown.