cooking @ home

For some time now I’ve been wanting to try my hand at baking. Ok, let me go back a bit. I don’t mean baking from scratch. I’m also not talking the other extreme of baking from a 100% premade box of Pillsbury or Duncan Hines or whatever. Somewhere in between.

You see, I already know from making cakes from a mix, that I’m bad at it. They taste good, but they look homemade. Ok, they look worse than homemade. Maybe it’s the frosting part that I don’t have down. I just know my cakes of the past tend to look something like that Salvador Dali painting where the watches are melted on tree limbs. When it comes to cookies from scratch things get weirder still. The easiest recipe I will botch totally. The more difficult cookie recipes come out fantastic. But I digress.

I wanted to “play” with doughs, that’s what I’ve been trying to say. Phillo, and puff, and pizza dough, and make my own raviolis (from premade sheets) and likewise my own fried dumplings or potstickers. For some reason, where I live, the supermarkets here don’t carry much of this. After going to five different markets I finally found one that carries pizza dough — as you saw in my recipe here — and another that carries puff pastry. Looks like the ravioli and wonton wrappers I’ll be making myself from scratch, and the philo dough is going to have to await my next trip into Center City Philly when I can get to a higher-scale food store.

In any event, after much searching I found frozen premade puff pastry. And, as usual — after a look at the basic directions and a couple of example recipes on the box — I proceed to totally ignore everything and went at it my own way. I always like a “get the lay of the land then walk somewhere” approach to my cooking. Especially if I’ve never done anything like it before. Let me understand the basics and a nuance or two, now dive in, get my hands into it and see what happens. If things go badly wrong, I’ll stop and do more basic research; if things go slightly wrong, that’s part of the game. And natch if things go great, that’s part of the game too — you just end up getting a high score for a newbie.

With that in mind, some jelly and some cream cheese in the fridge I went to work. In the next recipe you’ll see the progression. Meanwhile enjoy this one.

Fruit and Cream Cheese Triangles
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

One puffed pastry sheet
Strawberry preserves
Apricot preserves
Cream cheese
Egg and water for wash
Confectioners (powdered) sugar

Toss some flour on the cutting board or surface you’re using very lightly. Using a pizza cutter, slice the dough into nine squares, and then slice each square diagonally so you end up with 18 triangles.

Give two triangles a little egg wash. In one triangle place a teaspoon of preserves, atop it, a teaspoon of cream cheese. Take the second triangle, slightly pull it on all sides so it becomes wider than the first one, place atop to form the second side. Press down on the edges and with a fork crimp (notch) down all the sides. Put the fork lightly though the top of each mintart to create a hole for steam to escape from.

In an oven preheated to 350°F put the nine triangles on a cookie sheet preferably covered with parchment paper. Bake for 16-18 minutes until golden brown. Cover with confectioner’s sugar while still warm.