Bramley and Mincemeat Pasties

Another recipe from Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet, although it was Nigel Slater who reminded me of them a couple of weeks ago. The recipe has also been published in Dan's column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. The thought of making my own puff pastry, even rough puff, has always been offputting, but FB wanted to try these, and was willing to put in the work while I pottered around the kitchen giving advice (!!).

We made one major mistake, by not following the folding and rolling instructions properly, so spoiling the first half batch of pasties, but once we realised the fault we corrected it with the second batch, which came out much better. Our misreading of the instructions meant that we only built up half the number of layers in the pastry, which didn't incorporate the butter properly, resulting in much of it running out of the pasties onto the oven floor! By re-folding and rolling the second half of the pastry before using it, we got a much better result, although I think we were still short of a few layers. Still, it's a good learning experience, and means the mistake won't be repeated!

One gripe I have with the recipe is that you can't cut a 30 x30cm square into 6 even squares - you need a more rectangular shape to be able to do that - and you do need squares to get a neat triangular pasty. We rolled the dough to a rectangle which was roughly 24 x 36cm, giving 6 squares that were 12 x 12cm. There was also far more apple than we could get into the pasties - one apple would have been enough! We couldn't work out how to fold the pasty edges to seal them properly, either - I need to find a video of someone making a Cornish pasty, I think.

As always, the success of a mince pie  or pasty depends on the mincemeat, and we used a Cranberry and Port mincemeat which was very strongly flavoured. It still allowed the flavour of the apple in the filling to come through, but masked the ginger in the pastry, I think. The tart Bramley apple lessened the sweetness of the pasty - I often add grated apple to a jar of mincemeat for this reason.

These were really tasty, and well worth the time spent making the pastry. It wasn't really difficult, just time consuming, and really needs attempting when you won't get distracted by other chores.