This week’s recipes are a food stylist’s nightmare: “Brown food”. These are the dishes where the flavour is what lights up the table, not the colour. They’re designed to be simple to bring together using basic ingredients and they’re great ones to get the kids involved in at the weekend. The added bonus here is they can be easily frozen down and baked off as a treat midweek, the perfect partner to a strong cup of tea on the couch.
Both recipes are based around puff pastry, an intricate technique that requires a lot of skill and patience at home. It involves layering a proven dough with a block of chilled butter and folding it into book form. This is then rolled and chilled before being rolled and folded again and again until the layers of butter sit like wafer-thin pages in a hardback book. In the oven, the butter melts and flavours the dough, while creating air pockets in its wake. This is what results in the flaky shards of pastry we know and love. Sounds like a mammoth task? It is. Thankfully we have some great ready-made products in the supermarket that have done all the hard work for us. When possible, seek out all-butter puff pastry. I tend to get the ready-rolled ones as well: one less task to complete and clean up after.
With our ready-rolled sheet in hand, we can get to work on our sweet treats. The first recipe encases a simple apple compote made with Granny Smiths, butter, sugar and vanilla. The green apples maintain their texture when cooked and have a higher level of acidity. This is needed to cut through the richness of the pastry. They get “turned over” and encased in the pastry, glued together with some egg wash. The creme diplomat is a lightened custard base, scented with more vanilla and folded with whipped cream. Crack open the turnovers and dip the diplomat – comfort cooking of the highest level.
The second recipe is a type of roulade layered with chocolate chips and frangipane – an almond paste brought together with butter, vanilla and eggs. It’s all rolled together like a swiss roll and then cut with a sharp knife to reveal the layers. You can freeze the roulades at this point and bake from frozen or put them straight into the oven. Just cook them on a preheated tray so they go crisp on both sides but remain soft and comforting in the centre. Simple ingredients, scintillating results.
