Chocolate Cinnamon Pinwheels

A quick bake, both to keep something sweet available, while I am busy elsewhere, and use up one of the sheets of puff pastry which were bought greatly reduced and then frozen. Unfortunately, they didn't freeze well and are not easy to use, as by the time they are thoroughly thawed they are too warm to handle easily. I now have a mental note to only freeze blocks of pastry!

I just about managed to unroll and reroll the sheet of thawed pastry used for these pinwheels, without spoiling the pastry. I sprinkled the sheet with a mixture of 100g chopped plain chocolate, a scant teaspoon of cinnamon, two tablespoons of caster sugar and two finely crushed Ryvita. Using the Ryvita crumbs was a tip picked up from Dan Lepard's recipe for cinnamon buns. In these pastries they added both texture and a nutty flavour. I wetted one short edge of  the sheet of pastry, and rolled it up towards this edge, so as to seal in the filling. I then chilled the roll for 30 minutes before cutting it into twelve even slices, and laying them on a baking sheet. I then gathered together all the filling which had fallen out of the pastries during handling, and sprinkled some over each pinwheel. The pastries were baked at 220C for about 20 minutes until the pastry was risen and golden. Fortunately the chocolate stayed in lumps rather than melting which also gave a good texture when cooled.

For an impromptu bake, these were really delicious - the pastry was light and crisp and the filling rich and spicy, with just the right amount of cinnamon to keep the flavour well-balanced. The We Should Cocoa challenge this month is to use cinnamon with chocolate, but at the moment I'm going to hold these in reserve, as I have another idea to try if I have time!