Beautiful and tasty nectarine and frangipane flan

Masterchef Australia by itself is responsible for me producing a whole lot of recipes that I watched on the show. This delicious nectarine frangipane flan is one of those. Original recipe is from Maggie Beer.

While Tom and I watch episode after episode of season 1 of masterchef Australia, dish after dish is whipped up and even the ones that get bad reviews are probably all dishes I would not be able to make myself. So I’m always pretty impressed with what they make. Granted there are always people that tell me that the people on masterchef cannot cook. That it’s all child’s play. Child’s play?? Are you serious? Sure there is an element of show in there that’s just part of the tv series and that’s fine, but I refuse to believe that the top 24 of masterchef cannot cook. That’s just a ridiculous assumption.

I think they’re all brilliant. Some more then others (we all have our favorites) but I totally love watching the show and I do get inspired by it a great deal. I would not have made a chocolate mousse with olive oil if it wasn’t for George Calombaris and now this dessert. I think it was actually from season 3 that they showed this dish… I’m starting to wonder about the season now… (the reason being that they started season 3, while season 1 was still running. Very nice if the first episode shows you the winner of season 1. That was a total bummer…)

Delicious small flan with nectarine and verjus glaze

It was part of a 3 item dessert that Maggie Beer (what a lovely lady!!) presented to the contestants and they had to reproduce. This flan caught my eye and I just had to make it. Luckily the recipe was on the website of Maggie so that was easily fixed. However; one of the ingredients that was needed for this was verjuice glaze… What?? I never heard of verjuice (or verjus as we call it here) before so it took some tweeting around before I had the answer. It’s essentially the juice of unripe grapes and ofcourse, not something you can buy in a supermarket.

With a little taste of summer; nectarine flan

Luckily Hans Klomp, who is the (head?)chef at Vineyard Catering where I did a few foodshoots a couple of months back, tweeted to me that it was sold at Vanilla Venture. They responded via twitter quite quickly and while they normally don’t deliver to consumers they kindly agreed that I could buy a bottle. It was delivered to a restaurant here in Almere where I could pick it up. So fantastic service by Vanilla Venture! I was really happy with that.

So I had a bottle of verjuice but now I still needed to make the dessert. And that is what I did today. I loved the taste of the dessert; the sweetness of the frangipane and the slightly sour taste of the verjuice went brilliantly together. I did make a few mistakes when baking so it could have looked better, but this was my first time with this dough (never my strongest point) so all things considering; I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

Nectarine frangipane flan with verjuice glaze

5.0 from 4 reviews

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Recipe type: Dessert

Author: Maggie Beer (small adaption from me)

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Serves: 2

It’s summery, it’s fruity, it’s not as complicated as you might think and well, simply delicious!

Ingredients

• Sour Cream Pastry
• 75 gr flour
• 60 gr cold, unsalted butter, in cubes
• 40 gr sourcream
• Frangipane
• 60 gr butter, soft at roomtemperature
• 75 gr caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp grand marnier
• zest 1/4 lime
• 100 gr almond flour
• 10 gr all purpose flour
• Verjuice glaze
• 1/2 cup Brix verjus red (mix of red and white grapes)
• 1/4 cup castor sugar
• 2 nectarines, halved, deseeded and sliced thinly

Instructions

Pastry

1. Place flour and butter in a kitchen machine or stickblender and process until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
2. Add sour cream and pulse until pastry just starts to come together. Remove, divide in half and press into two discs. Cover with cling wrap and place in a refrigerator to chill for 10 minutes.

Frangipane

1. Preheat a fan forced oven to 175 C. For the frangipane, place butter and castor sugar into kitchen machine or stick blender and process until light and creamy.
2. Add egg and process for 1 minute. Add the Grand Marnier and lemon zest and process for 30 seconds before adding the flour and almond meal. Process to combine.
3. Set aside until ready to use.

For the verjuice glaze, pour the Brix verjuice and sugar into a small saucepan and allow to boil rapidly for 2 minutes.

1. Remove from heat and set aside. Place pastry between two sheets of baking paper and roll out to 3 mm thick.
2. Roughly cut two 6 cm x 9 cm rectangles, transfer to a baking paper lined oven tray.
3. Make a slight insertion, only half way through the pastry, 3 mm from the edge, down both sides and at either ends. Prick the centre cut section with a fork. Place onto a baking paper lined oven tray and bake for 15 minutes. Just to be clear here; you remove the puffed up part of the centre piece, so not the entire middle part as that will leave you with just the edges. What you need is like a little basket where you can put the frangipane in. In the oven the middle part will have puffed up a bit, you take that top layer of.
4. Remove from oven and remove the centre piece of the pastry, leaving you with a small case. Fill centre with 1 tbsp of frangipane.
5. Top frangipane with 5-6 slices of nectarine and brush with verjuice syrup.
6. Bake for 10-15 minutes, remove from oven and brush with verjuice syrup and set aside to cool.

Notes

Depending on your oven the baking times might be longer. I found that mine were not browning yet after 15 minutes in the oven, but I didn’t know how much more they would brown in the 2nd part so I took them out which was a mistake looking back. They can be a bit brown when you start on the second process. If it is still too raw it will not cook properly.

The part where it says to remove the middle section can be a little confusing. I know I was confused initially. What you need to do is you remove the top layer of the middle section but you leave the bottom in as that will have to support your frangipane.

Google Recipe View Microformatting by Easy Recipe

2.1.7

If you’re also curious to find out how the former contestants and winner of the first season of Masterchef Australia are doing? I know I was, so I  looked up the websites of my favorites. So have a look if you want!

Julie Goodwin – Julie is on her second cookbook now which is about to be released soon.

Justine Schofield – Justine has started her own catering company

Poh Ling Yeow (with her artwork) – and via ABC tv where she has her own tv series called Poh’s Kitchen I would love to watch that but it’s in Australia only apparently…

Chris Badenoch – He wrote a cookbook too but there is also some controversial stuff going on around him. I’m not interested enough to find out but if you’re into juice gossip… I would google some more.

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Spring rolls

While the rain keeps pouring down outside I was very much in the mood for something that would give me a bit of a spring feeling. I mean; I don’t mind winter but the current weather is too miserable! Ofcourse I am officially not allowed to complain as we are leaving on our trip to Costa Rica on saturday so I will have to endure only two more days of rain before (hopefully) enjoying some sunshine. It’s been a rather weird week. Tom’s grandma died very unexpectedly last friday at the age of 88. And while that is respectable age it still always comes as a surprise. Just a week before we had celebrated her 88th birthday with the entire family and she was in fairly good health (taking her age into consideration) and no matter how much you know it is coming; it is always hard to lose a loved one.

The cremation is this friday, so the day before we leave. Which means that on the one hand I am busy packing but on the other hand there is that…. Plus Tom has been busy getting into trainings at his new job and he hasn’t stayed home for the first part of the week. So all in all, it’s been a weird week. But all weeks come to an end and this one will end as well..

So on to this springy little dish. I saw the original recipe online at the Good Food website but didn’t feel like eating prawns which was in the original. I imagine it will be great with prawns too but since I was in the process of getting rid of the content of our fridge and had some leftover chicken, that is what I used. And well, what can I say about these rolls other then; what’s not to love? They taste incredibly nice and the good things about springrolls is that you can fill them with whatever you like.

I use fillopastry to make the rolls but I still have some ricepaper too which I am dying to use for the next time. I am thinking of making steamed ones so they become translucent. I like the baked ones better but I think the steamed ones just look so pretty! See through and everything!

So how to make these little darlings? It’s not hard at all and here’s what you need:

CHICKEN SPRING ROLL WRAPS (serves 4) Adapted from Good Food website

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We first met Carle during one of our courses at the Kookstudio Amsterdam, where we were very impressed with the way he teaches. His knowledge of baking, dessert and pastry is enormous and he is very good in transferring that knowledge to other people, so when we found out that he is giving patisserie courses as well, we ofcourse had to enrol. It took a while before we managed to find a date, which was mostly due to our ridiculously busy schedule but we finally managed to set four dates for the four lessons. And last night was our first lesson. We went to Amsterdam where Carle has his own bakery and shop, Douglas Delights, in the centre of Amsterdam. Carle is quite well known within the Netherlands and has an impressive resume. He’s worked for the Amstel hotel, has worked in several well known restaurants to end up in Amsterdam to teach us, mere mortals, the ins and outs of his trade.

Carle calculating what we need

We first started (well, we started with coffee and a wonderful delicious piece of cake that Carle made….mmm, but that doesn’t count as an official starting does it?) with going through the list of various batters and doughs that there are. I never knew there were so many!! I am not gonna name them all here, but let me just say that the list is extensive. A lot of them are not well known in Holland, but would be – for instance – well known in France. After going through the list we got to choose what we wanted to make. Obviously you cannot possibly make all of them in one evening, so we picked puff pastry, shortcrust pastry, Joconde and tulip. I had made puff pastry once before, for one of the Daring Bakers challenges where we made vol-au-vents. But we all thought it would be a good exercise to make it as it is not the easiests of dough to create.

Our group is very small, with only three people, which is great as you can ask all the questions you want. Our group consists of Anita, who is also a trained patissier and has had an internship with Carle. She is now starting up her own business in Hilversum. And then there is Tom and me. So we are actually the only two amateurs in the class… But it’s great to have two experts to teach us how it is all to be done! (although technically, Anita is not there to teach us, but we also learn a great deal from watching experts at work, right?)

Preparing the tulip on a baking sheet

Because the space is not big, we make something all together, which works better for me as well. Carle shows us how to do something and then we take turns in either rolling out the dough (and believe me, I am lousy in rolling out properly, but I now I know at least what I am doing wrong!!), kneading something, whipping eggwhites etc. So the end result is a combined effort of us all.

Joconde is a type of batter that is used a lot for decorationcake. And with decorationcake I mean a very thin cake that is baked on a baking paper and then used as a ring (for instance) on another cake. You can make patterns in it by using the tulip batter to make letters or use patterns as is being done above by Carle.

We started with preparing the tulip batter as that needs to freeze before you can use it. The ingredients for this are:

Tulip batter

55 gr butter (very soft)

65 gr caster sugar

70 gr eggwhites

55 gr flour

5 gr cacao

Mix everything together and use to make a pattern on a baking sheet such as per the photo here. Let your imagination run wild! You can color this batter in any color you look using foodcoloring. We used cacao to make it chocolately but you could easily make it pink, red or whatever other color you fancy. Put the sheet on a baking tray and keep in the freezer until completely stiff.

Making puff pastry... forgot to take a photo of the block of butter on the dough...

Once the tulip is prepared and in the freezer you can make the Joconde batter which is essentially a genoise batter but with almond and I think more sugar and flour.

Joconde batter:

125 gr ground almonds

100 gr castersugar

165 gr of egg

Mix all of these together into an airy batter. Works best in a kitchenaid (or similar).

110 gr eggwhite

42 gr castersugar

Beat the eggwhite stiff with the castersugar.

35 gr flour

25 gr of melted butter

Mix the first part of the batter first with the extra flour, then add the butter and then the whipped eggwhites. Fold all of this in gently. Once the batter is complete and the tulip patterns are frozen you can spread this over the same bakingsheet.

Anita spreading the batter

Once it is evenly spread you can put it in the oven at 230°C until it is light brownish on top. Remove from the bakingplate as soon as possible (we sort of forgot and since the plate it hot, it keeps baking making the outsides too thin.. O well, we are students right?)

And this is then the final result. You can then proceed to cut out small strips and put that in rings to put another cake in. We will continue on that next week and will finish it then. We also made shortcrust pastry which we’re going to make into delicious little things next week… Aren’t you all curious what it is gonna be??

Cake with baked in patterns!

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With tuna

When coming back from holiday one of the first things I did was to check out the new assignment for the daring bakers. I would ofcourse have less time then the usual month, so figured I should make sure that I could do it in the time left. So when I read that we were to make puff pastry my first reactions was ‘o nooooo’ thinking that it would be really hard to make!

And I am not going to tell you here that it was incredibly easy or that nothing can go wrong, but it was a rather pleasant surprise to find that it is nowhere near as difficult as some people might make you believe. Ok, mine weren’t perfect as they didn’t rise evenly (even with or without using the silicon mat to weigh it down in the beginning) but I am guessing I did something wrong somewhere. The taste sure wasn’t any less for it!

Filled with bakers cream and raspberry

The September 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

The whole process starts with adding flour and water to make the dough and then add a pound of unsalted butter into the dough (process is explained in the recipe). I was glad that I watched  a couple of videos on how the process was supposed to look, as without it I would have been even more afraid to start with making my first ever puff pastry.

After spending quite some time making the dough, doing all the turns, chilling the dough in between, etc. I didn’t really feel like coming up with something elaborate on the filling so I chose some very basic stuff. The savoury one was filled with home made tuna salad (with canned tuna I still had in the cupboard) and the sweet one was made with bakers cream and raspberries. I will be making a few more with whipped cream and strawberries also but no photos of those.

I’ve only used 1/3 of the dough so will probably be making more out of them. We’re going to have various filling tonight for dinner, so depending on how many are being devoured I will probably still freeze something too.

After all the anticipation I had it was easier then I thought and I might even attempt to make this again! You hardly need any ingredients at all, apart from the filling and the dough is quite versatile. You can make vol-au-vents but you can use for lots of different pastry thingies as well. I’ve got to think of what to make with the remaining dough. While I like vol-au-vents; I don’t want to use all the dough for that.

The instructions for making them is quite lenghty but here it is!

Forming and Baking the Vols-au-Vent

Yield: 1/3 of the puff pastry recipe below will yield about 8-10 1.5” vols-au-vent or 4 4” vols-au-vent

In addition to the equipment listed above, you will need:
-well-chilled puff pastry dough (recipe below)
-egg wash (1 egg or yolk beaten with a small amount of water)
-your filling of choice

Line a baking sheet with parchment and set aside.

Using a knife or metal bench scraper, divided your chilled puff pastry dough into three equal pieces. Work with one piece of the dough, and leave the rest wrapped and chilled. (If you are looking to make more vols-au-vent than the yield stated above, you can roll and cut the remaining two pieces of dough as well…if not, then leave refrigerated for the time being or prepare it for longer-term freezer storage. See the “Tips” section below for more storage info.)

On a lightly floured surface, roll the piece of dough into a rectangle about 1/8 to 1/4-inch (3-6 mm) thick. Transfer it to the baking sheet and refrigerate for about 10 minutes before proceeding with the cutting.

(This assumes you will be using round cutters, but if you do not have them, it is possible to cut square vols-au-vents using a sharp chef’s knife.) For smaller, hors d’oeuvre sized vols-au-vent, use a 1.5” round cutter to cut out 8-10 circles. For larger sized vols-au-vent, fit for a main course or dessert, use a 4” cutter to cut out about 4 circles. Make clean, sharp cuts and try not to twist your cutters back and forth or drag your knife through the dough. Half of these rounds will be for the bases, and the other half will be for the sides. (Save any scrap by stacking—not wadding up—the pieces…they can be re-rolled and used if you need extra dough. If you do need to re-roll scrap to get enough disks, be sure to use any rounds cut from it for the bases, not the ring-shaped sides.)

Using a ¾-inch cutter for small vols-au-vent, or a 2- to 2.5-inch round cutter for large, cut centers from half of the rounds to make rings. These rings will become the sides of the vols-au-vent, while the solid disks will be the bottoms. You can either save the center cut-outs to bake off as little “caps” for you vols-au-vent, or put them in the scrap pile.

Dock the solid bottom rounds with a fork (prick them lightly, making sure not to go all the way through the pastry) and lightly brush them with egg wash. Place the rings directly on top of the bottom rounds and very lightly press them to adhere. Brush the top rings lightly with egg wash, trying not to drip any down the sides (which may inhibit rise). If you are using the little “caps,” dock and egg wash them as well.

Refrigerate the assembled vols-au-vent on the lined baking sheet while you pre-heat the oven to 400ºF (200ºC). (You could also cover and refrigerate them for a few hours at this point.)

Once the oven is heated, remove the sheet from the refrigerator and place a silicon baking mat (preferred because of its weight) or another sheet of parchment over top of the shells. This will help them rise evenly. Bake the shells until they have risen and begin to brown, about 10-15 minutes depending on their size. Reduce the oven temperature to 350ºF (180ºC), and remove the silicon mat or parchment sheet from the top of the vols-au-vent. If the centers have risen up inside the vols-au-vent, you can gently press them down. Continue baking (with no sheet on top) until the layers are golden, about 15-20 minutes more. (If you are baking the center “caps” they will likely be finished well ahead of the shells, so keep an eye on them and remove them from the oven when browned.)

Remove to a rack to cool. Cool to room temperature for cold fillings or to warm for hot fillings.

Fill and serve.

*For additional rise on the larger-sized vols-au-vents, you can stack one or two additional ring layers on top of each other (using egg wash to “glue”). This will give higher sides to larger vols-au-vents, but is not advisable for the smaller ones, whose bases may not be large enough to support the extra weight.

*Although they are at their best filled and eaten soon after baking, baked vols-au-vent shells can be stored airtight for a day.

*Shaped, unbaked vols-au-vent can be wrapped and frozen for up to a month (bake from frozen, egg-washing them first).

Michel Richard’s Puff Pastry Dough

From: Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan
Yield: 2-1/2 pounds dough

Steph’s note: This recipe makes more than you will need for the quantity of vols-au-vent stated above. While I encourage you to make the full recipe of puff pastry, as extra dough freezes well, you can halve it successfully if you’d rather not have much leftover.

There is a wonderful on-line video from the PBS show “Baking with Julia” that accompanies the book. In it, Michel Richard and Julia Child demonstrate making puff pastry dough (although they go on to use it in other applications). They do seem to give slightly different ingredient measurements verbally than the ones in the book…I listed the recipe as it appears printed in the book. http://video.pbs.org/video/1174110297/search/Pastry

Ingredients:
2-1/2 cups (12.2 oz/ 354 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1-1/4 cups (5.0 oz/ 142 g) cake flour
1 tbsp. salt (you can cut this by half for a less salty dough or for sweet preparations)
1-1/4 cups (10 fl oz/ 300 ml) ice water
1 pound (16 oz/ 454 g) very cold unsalted butter

plus extra flour for dusting work surface

Mixing the Dough:

Check the capacity of your food processor before you start. If it cannot hold the full quantity of ingredients, make the dough into two batches and combine them.

Put the all-purpose flour, cake flour, and salt in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade and pulse a couple of times just to mix. Add the water all at once, pulsing until the dough forms a ball on the blade. The dough will be very moist and pliable and will hold together when squeezed between your fingers. (Actually, it will feel like Play-Doh.)

Remove the dough from the machine, form it into a ball, with a small sharp knife, slash the top in a tic-tac-toe pattern. Wrap the dough in a damp towel and refrigerate for about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the butter between 2 sheets of plastic wrap and beat it with a rolling pin until it flattens into a square that’s about 1″ thick. Take care that the butter remains cool and firm: if it has softened or become oily, chill it before continuing.

Incorporating the Butter:

Unwrap the dough and place it on a work surface dusted with all-purpose flour (A cool piece of marble is the ideal surface for puff pastry) with your rolling pin (preferably a French rolling pin without handles), press on the dough to flatten it and then roll it into a 10″ square. Keep the top and bottom of the dough well floured to prevent sticking and lift the dough and move it around frequently. Starting from the center of the square, roll out over each corner to create a thick center pad with “ears,” or flaps.

Place the cold butter in the middle of the dough and fold the ears over the butter, stretching them as needed so that they overlap slightly and encase the butter completely. (If you have to stretch the dough, stretch it from all over; don’t just pull the ends) you should now have a package that is 8″ square.

To make great puff pastry, it is important to keep the dough cold at all times. There are specified times for chilling the dough, but if your room is warm, or you work slowly, or you find that for no particular reason the butter starts to ooze out of the pastry, cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate it . You can stop at any point in the process and continue at your convenience or when the dough is properly chilled.

Making the Turns:

Gently but firmly press the rolling pin against the top and bottom edges of the square (this will help keep it square). Then, keeping the work surface and the top of the dough well floured to prevent sticking, roll the dough into a rectangle that is three times as long as the square you started with, about 24″ (don’t worry about the width of the rectangle: if you get the 24″, everything else will work itself out.) With this first roll, it is particularly important that the butter be rolled evenly along the length and width of the rectangle; check when you start rolling that the butter is moving along well, and roll a bit harder or more evenly, if necessary, to get a smooth, even dough-butter sandwich (use your arm-strength!).

With a pastry brush, brush off the excess flour from the top of the dough, and fold the rectangle up from the bottom and down from the top in thirds, like a business letter, brushing off the excess flour. You have completed one turn.

Rotate the dough so that the closed fold is to your left, like the spine of a book. Repeat the rolling and folding process, rolling the dough to a length of 24″ and then folding it in thirds. This is the second turn.

Chilling the Dough:

If the dough is still cool and no butter is oozing out, you can give the dough another two turns now. If the condition of the dough is iffy, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes. Each time you refrigerate the dough, mark the number of turns you’ve completed by indenting the dough with your fingertips. It is best to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes between each set of two turns.

The total number of turns needed is six. If you prefer, you can give the dough just four turns now, chill it overnight, and do the last two turns the next day. Puff pastry is extremely flexible in this regard. However, no matter how you arrange your schedule, you should plan to chill the dough for at least an hour before cutting or shaping it.

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I had a serious amount of puff pastry left over from something I will tell you about in a few days… and I wanted to use it. I am not going in putting stuff in the freezer. I usually end up forgetting completely I ever made anything that went into the freezer. You see our freezer is usually stuffed to the brim with fishfood. For when Tom decided he wants to go carp fishing, so the little space that is left goes to things like peas and maybe some fries or meat I bought.

Anyway, I saw a recipe for vegetarian wellingtons in the Good Food and decided to change it a bit to be a little less vegetarian (but you could easily make it a veggie version if you like) as I had some leftover chicken that I wanted to use.

It’s actually a really easy recipe; if you have either storebought puff pastry or homemade puff pastry you can easily fill this with anything you like. I used spinach, mushrooms, chicken and cheese and rolled out the pastry with some thyme which is also sprinkled a bit on top to give it a bit added flavor. To be honest I thought it was lovely but quite heavy on the stomach. No wonder really with all that pastry made with loads of butter, so if you’re on a diet (as I should be!!) don’t go for this dish! But it’s lovely and quick (apart from the needed time in the oven)

WELLINGTONS

Chestnut mushrooms about 200 gr sliced

4 tbsp olive oil

1 garlic clove, chopped

100 gr chicken cooked or smoked, shredded or chopped

300 gr spinach leaves

a bit of flour for rolling the pastry

1 tbsp of picked thyme leaves

350-500 gr puff pastry block

140 gr cheese (use one with a bit of sharp taste. Stilton would be nice but I could easily see any blue cheese go well here too)

1 egg, beaten for the eggwash

1 Heat the oven to 200 C. Clean the mushrooms and slice. Heat the oil in the frying pan and sizzle the mushrooms for about 3-4 minutes untill golden and cooked through. Lift them out of the pan and let drain on kitchen towel.

2. Place the pan back and add the rest of the oil. Fry the garlic briefly before adding the spinach in the pan and stir for about 2-3 minutes untill it’s completely wilted. Season with salt and pepper and leave to drain thorougly! I actually squeezed most of the water out with my hands once the spinach got a bit cooled down.

3. On a lightly floured surface sprinkle the thyme leaves and the roll out your puff pastry block to about a dollar coin thickness. Using two round shapes cut out 2 circles and then 2 circles that are about 10 cm wider then the first.

4. Place the smaller circles on a baking tray and carefully arrange your spinach, mushrooms, cheese and chicken on top making sure you leave space around the edges to place the larger circle over. Brush the border around your filling and then gently stretch the larger circle over the top of your filling making sure not to trap any air.

Press the edges with a fork. Trim the edges with a knife if you want to, then brush them both generously with eggwash. Bake for 40 minutes untill golden, then leave to cool for a few minutes before serving.

Ofcourse the size of your pastries determines for how many people this recipe is. I made two but you can make four smaller ones or 1 large one. That’s up to you!

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