Sfogliatella (the cheats way) | Bake Off Bake Along

Another bake off first with Italian week! I enjoyed it, it was good, but I felt pretty awful for the bakers. Surely there's some A/C they can put on in the tent for them? Those temperatures just looked like torture. 

I was pretty sad to see Yan go, she was so much better and more creative than some others, and Steven getting star baker, when his showstopper was burnt was a bit of an eye roll moment for me. 

So many delicious cannoli flavours this week and I love a cannoli. Liam's s'mores one just looked dreamy and lemon cheesecake, yes please! Did anyone else think the technical pizza challenge looked a bit sad? Where was all the cheese?! As for the showstopper, I've never heard of sfogliatella and it looked like a nightmare with that much rolling out until it was paper thin. 

For Bake Off Bake Along this week, I opted to take on sfogliatella (the cheats way), purely because after frying churros last year, it took me days to get the fried oil smell out of the house and as for the technical, I just didn't have enough time for pizza dough this weekend. 

However one issue I had with sfogliatella was that I don't have a pasta machine to roll it out super thin, which is why I cheated with bought puff pastry. I also made these at the end of a super crazy busy weekend spent up in Hertfordshire, so didn't really have enough time to faff around with homemade pastry. 

As for filling, I could have gone the typical ricotta route, but unfortunately didn't. Not a lot of the people that I was planning to feed these to liked ricotta, so I chose to fill half with pastry cream and half with nutella, because they both sound like dreamy combos. The pastry cream recipe was this one from BBC, just your standard pastry cream, and this was added after baking and cooling. 

The nutella ones turned out much much better, I think mainly because they were baked with the filling. The pastry cream ones were good, but filling after baking wasn't as easy. So next time, I would definitely try and bake the pastry cream inside of them. 

The layers aren't so defined if you do it the cheats way but the effect is there. I think, if I did them again, I would just roll the pastry out thinner by hand before layering them and rolling. Because as they are now, they really are just like fancy looking pastries...

Sfogliatella (the cheats way)

Makes: 9 

Ingredients:

x1 block of puff pastry (500g)

50g melted butter

nutella

pastry cream

2tbsp milk

Directions:

1. Roll out the puff pastry on a well floured surface. You want the pastry to be as thin as possible and in the shape of a rectangle. 
2. Cut three strips of pastry, cutting along the longest side down. Spread melted butter along one strip and place a second strip on top. Then butter the next strip and place the final strip on top and spread with butter. 
3. Roll up the strips from the shortest end until you have a short roll, Wrap in cling wrap and place in the freezer for an hour. 
4. Remove from freezer and preheat the oven to 190C/gas mark 5. Line two baking trays with parchment paper. Cut the roll into 9 slices and with the slices, press down the layers, rotating the disc as you go, pushing the center out more as you go. Fold over so it looks kind of like a shell. Repeat for all of the discs. 
5. Fill half with 1 tbsp nutella and seal the edges. If filling afterwards, just seal the edges down. Brush with milk and bake for 20-25 or until golden brown. 
6. Remove from the oven to cool slightly. The nutella ones are best served warm. Allow the remaining unfilled half to cool slightly before piping in the pastry cream.