Bake Day Wednesday 2016: Week 5: Pastry week

This week it was pastry week on Bake Off. As I went to see Bridget Jones's Baby at the cinema instead of staying in and watching Bake Off (which I loved; it'd been ages since I last went to the cinema) this post is a little delayed. I did manage to do some pastry baking though.

It took me a while to decide what to bake this week. I tend to prefer sweet pastry, but I'd already baked a cake this week (with a lot of assistance from my children), so we didn't need pudding options. I didn't have time to bake a pie, which would have been my preference, so I settled for sausage rolls. I was going to make them with shortcrust pastry, but had a last minute change of plan and went for puff pastry instead. I have made rough puff pastry once before, and it was horrible. I made it as part of a school food technology project on different types of pastry, and mine can out grey and non-flaky, so I have since avoided it.

I went for the rough puff pastry recipe from the Bero cookbook that I mentioned last week. The recipe was straightforward: chop fat up, stir into flour, then add enough water that it becomes a dough. Then there was a lot of rolling: roll the pastry into a long strip, fold into thirds, roll out again; repeat several times, then leave the pastry to rest. So far so good. When I took the pastry out of the fridge, it was rather sticky (I think the butter was too warm when I started, and I might have added a little too much water), but I just about managed to fashion messy sausage rolls out of it. Once they came out of the oven they looked a lot better (even if I did forget to brush them with egg), and the pastry turned out much better than I remember my first attempt tasting. Not that it's all that flaky, just very buttery! I think this is one that needs revisiting.

Don't forget you have a few more days to enter the competition I am currently running. I'll drawer a winner once I'm back from Yarndale this weekend.