After making danish pastries at college, I thought I'd have a go at making puff pastry at home as the technique of making the dough is fairly similar and therefore it would be good practice for my assesment!
Puff pastry is time consuming to make, which I why I decided that Sunday would be the perfect day for attempting it! I actually found the whole process rather therapeutic and enjoyable, as I was able to take my time and work at my own (slow!) pace.
After all my hard work making puff pastry that day, later on in the week I suggested to my sister Helen that we bake something together for a change. I let Helen choose the treats, and she said she'd like to make cornflake tart (just like we used to have at school), amaretto cupcakes and rocky road (can't really go wrong there!).
For the cornflake tart, we found a recipe on the internet (see here) and used this as a guideline. Instead of normal cornflakes we used crunchy nut and reduced the sugar slightly to compensate. We also made our own shortcrust pastry rather than using ready rolled!
The amaretto cupcakes were soaked in an amaretto syrup once removed from the oven to really intensify the almond flavour and keep them moist. As the cupcakes were quite sweet, I made an almond buttercream icing rather than the sickly sweet butter icing you normally find on a cupcake.
It was my grandma who gave me my recipe for rocky road as she once made some and I thought it was absolutely divine! It is really simple thing to make, requires no baking and there are so many variations. I like to add mini marshmallows, raisins, biscuits and glace cherries to mine, but you can include whatever you like really!
I think Helen found our baking session to be quite enjoyable and a nice break from her university work so it seems likely that we will be baking together again in the near future!
