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.

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!