(Cheating) Danish Pastries.

I just started to write this post to you all ‘nothing really exciting today...just a nice way to use up any leftover pastry and crème patissierie that you might have after making the custard tarts of last week’. It maybe felt like a bit of a come down after the air punching, patting-myself-on-the-back fest induced by this week’s other (very brilliant) offering of peanut butter (genius) cupcakes. I clearly am not over them yet.

But then I shook off the relative gloom (in large part a result of the relentless and torrential rain IN JUNE AAAAAGGH) and started patting myself on the back some more. Because, hell, I made Danish Pastries. Ok not reeeeeal Danish Pastries with yeast and trips to Denmark for research and all that jazz. Such right and proper pastries have indeed been on my ‘to bake’ list for a while now but they require methods which I think you will find fairly inaccessible (not in a patronising way, just in an ‘if I haven’t been bothered to get round to it yet, I very much doubt you’ll fancy doing it any time soon’ way).

These though...these are knock-up-able in almost as quick a time as it takes me to choose which uninspiring, disappointingly dry and shrivelled looking pastry I want from the supermarket shelves and then ends in me buying nothing and declaring that homemade muffins will have to do. And let me tell you, muffins, when one wants pastry, simply will not do. So here, make these, especially if you have left over pastry. Because they’re delicious and have all the good qualities of proper shop bought pastries without the bad ones. AND you get to have made your own Danish Pastries.

Oh gosh...I’m waffling. Mmmmwaffles. Yes. Think this house arrest (lack of job and temporary lack of partner and SO MUCH RAIN...IN JUNE...should you want an update) is turning my brain into crème patissiere. So anyway. Make these, make the pastry especially for the purpose, if you feel like it, or use the bought stuff. Whatever. Just don’t leave out the back patting and air punching. With Love and Cake.

Cheating Danish Pastries.

A few notes:

• I'm not really going to give you very prescriptive instructions here, it's just kind of like 'cut and stick' with pastry and if you're using leftover bits and pieces, grams and spoonfuls is not very helpful. Make any shape and size you want, use any filling you want, make savoury ones, make Nutella ones....go crazy creative. I'll just tell you roughly what I did.

You will need

a baking sheet, greased with butter

shop bought puff pastry or homemade flaky pastry

creme patissiere

maple syrup

blueberries

pecan nuts, toasted

icing sugar

• Preheat the oven to 200 °c.
• For the filling I stirred the maple syrup into the creme patissiere.
• Now roll out the pastry, in lots and lots of icing sugar, so it's about 1/2 cm thick.
• I cut some squares and some rectangles and dolloped the mapley creme patissiere in the middle of each.
• On some creme patissiere blobs I sprinkled blueberries and on others, pecans. 
• Now for the folding. The rectangles, I folded the long sides into the middle, and the squares, I got a bit creative like this.....

• ...or you could just fold the four corners into the middle to meet each other, like I did with one of them.
• When they're all ready to go, get them on you baking sheet and bake in the hot oven fro 15-20 minutes (or more or less depending on the size of your pastries).
• When the pastries are golden and crispy, remove from the oven and move immediately onto a wire rack to cool, you don't want any sugar to cool and set and stick everything to the baking sheet.
• Dust liberally with icing sugar, eat and air punch.