Day 27: Apple roses

I found this recipe via a friend's Facebook page. Both are awesome. The recipe is exactly the sort of thing I like - easy, with apples and pastry. The FB page is pretty much bakery glamour shots.

I had it in my mind that I was going to make these today. (And it just occurred to me that friends we saw this afternoon will realise we didn't bring our treats to share. Awkward turtle. Anyhoo!) Even though we had a thing to go to this afternoon, and Hub let me sleep in, I wilfully stuck to my plan knowing it would keep me busy right up to going out the door. I even remembered, when I was calculating the time it would take, to forget to think about how fiddly the assembly would be.

Thank you daggy container-with-cutting-attachments thingy. Couldn't've done it without you.

The recipe called for one sheet of pastry for three apples. I used three Granny Smiths but easily used two sheets, with the same amount of sugar coating. Krisztina must've had larges sheets.

It also says to put them on a baking tray or in a cupcake-type tray. I imagined the apple would release a lot of juice so I used some patty pans in a cupcake tray. But I think two things could've impacted that:

1. I over cooked the apple by about half a minute and I think it took on a lot of liquid. They only need to be softened, not cooked. They were still workable so nothing huge lost but I wonder how much difference that made. I possibly didn't 'dry' them adequately on the tea towel either.

2. I didn't attempt to seal the pastries at the bottom. I let the apple stay exposed at the base so the juice was always going to go somehow here rather than pool in the pastry. Maybe if I'd fashioned them so that the base was all pastry, and used a tray, they would've browned better and been crispier.
Food for thought for next time.

Another disclosure: I didn't have any apricot jam with which to warm and glaze the pastries. Instead I used raspberry, blueberry and cranberry jam, which gave them a lovely rosy hue - a lovely side-effect!

Nevertheless, it's a puff-pastry-with-apple-&-cinnamon recipe. Rather hard to go wrong flavour-wise. Mine aren't as pretty as Krizstina's but I won't be throwing them out!

Hmmm. If I keep at this baking thing, I may actually start having standards.