Crunchy Croutons
Save your stale bread from the bin and add some crunch to your salad with these croutons.
Leftover Pastry Roly-Poly
The Messy Baker Charmian Christie puts a modern twist on a traditional dessert with this nut roly-poly. Great for using up leftover pastry.
Don’t lose track while you’re cooking, click on an ingredient or step to tick it off so you know where you are up to.
Ingredients
- Leftover pastry
- Butter, room temperature
- Brown sugar
- Cinnamon
- Finely chopped walnuts (or almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios or pecans)
Method
- Line an oven tray with baking paper.
- Gather all the scraps of pastry leftover from making your pie or tarts. Form them into a ball, and on a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a long thin strip about 10 to 15cm wide. Roll it as thinly as you can without breaking the dough.
- Butter the pastry down the middle lengthways, leaving a good 2.5cm unbuttered on either side.
- Sprinkle a layer of brown sugar over the butter. Then sprinkle on the ground cinnamon, followed by the nuts.
- Fold the unbuttered lengths toward the middle. They should overlap and cover the filling.
- If your dough is long enough, shape it into a circle by tucking one end into the other. If your dough isn’t long enough to bend, simply pinch the ends to seal them. If your pie was coated with an egg-wash, you can coat the roly-poly too, but it’s equally fine to bake the pastry as is.
- Place the roly-poly onto the prepared baking sheet. If you are cooking a pie in the oven, you can bake your roly-poly at the same time. Otherwise bake your roly-poly at 180 degrees until the pastry is cooked and any brown sugar that has escaped is melted and bubbly. This usually takes 20 minutes, but the timing will vary with oven temperature.
- Place the roly-poly pan on a wire rack to cool. Cut it into pieces – you can eat this warm or cold.