Baking, and trying something new

November 12, 2020

I wanted to bake, and I didn’t want to make cake*. And I’ve wanted to improve my pastry skills, I’d really like to make one of these raised pies but thought I’d better have some pastry practice first. I remembered that one of the challenges on GBBO’s pastry week *had been Cornish pasties. That seemed a nice idea and I was pretty certain I’d find a recipe for them in here.

And there was. But there were a few problems: i) a traditional Cornish pasty is filled with a meat and vegetable mix, and we try not to eat meat during the week, ii) we didn’t have any meat anyway, iii) the recipe served six. So a problem solving as well as cooking exercise, compounded by the fact that the pastry recipe was on a different page to the pasty recipe. (I was quite expecting autocorrect to put an “r” into “pasty” there).

And was for yet another quantity of pastry. Aargh!

I have always been better at word than number puzzles** but pretty much managed to get the ratios right, for the pastry at least.

I made the filling using a mix of potato, suede (turnip for the Scots), shallot, and the leftover Hallowe’en pumpkin, dried chillies, garam masala, black pepper and salt. I added a little turmeric into the pastry mix too but it didn’t really show up. My arithmetic must have been a bit off because I had way too much filling for my pastry.

I managed to make two fairly decent circles of pastry

And filled them up quite nicely

There they are, filled and crimped, then brushed with egg ready for baking.

I’d halved the recipe, so there should have been three pasties. Yes the recipe served six and there’s just MrS and I, but halves are easier. And we’re greedy. Unfortunately there wasn’t quite enough pastry for a proper third pasty. But I managed to scrape together enough to make this one.