What To Do With Left Over Shortcrust Pastry?

What do you do with your leftover shortcrust pastry?

If you ask most home cooks they will probably say make jam tarts, lemon curd tarts or something similar.
 I was quite interested to see a good idea appear on my facebook news feed a couple of weeks ago for pastry biscuits with leftovers. Such a simple idea but a great new one for us at The Old Red Lion to serve complimentary to our customers, with a dip, whilst they peruse the menu.
So what do you do? Well as i said, simple! Roll out your pastry. Cut out some circles, or other shapes if you prefer, with cutters. Place on a baking sheet and top with salt and pepper. You can add other toppings if you fancy. I sprinkled poppy seeds on some and sesame seeds on others. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

Shortcrust Pastry Biscuits Ready To Bake In The Oven

 

When cooled serve with your favourite dips!
I put my first batch with red onion marmalade.

Shortcrust Pastry Biscuits With Red Onion Marmalade Dip

And for the second batch I made a garlic, red onion, red pepper and ricotta dip. Easily made in the food processor!
Seemed to go down very well with tonights customers.

Shortcrust Pastry Biscuits With Red Onion, Red Pepper, Garlic & Ricotta Dip

 

So what do you do with your leftover pastry??

Summer Wedding

This Saturday saw The Old Red Lion play host to a high tea wedding reception.
Fortunately the heavy lunchtime downpour of rain turned into an afternoon of hot sunny weather, perfect for afternoon tea!
Food was fiddly, and time consuming to make, but well worth the effort when it was all put together and a perfect end result achieved.
Unfortunately we were too busy to be able to take as many photos as we would have liked but below is a small selection.

Restaurant at The Old Red Lion laid up for high tea.

Pretty bunting

Table arrangemennts

Mis match of crockery gives a great effect

table decorations

Bride and groom initials

Champagne reception

Smoked salmon& cream cheese blinis

Canapes.
Mushroom and tarragon crostini.
 Mini yorkshires with beef and horseradish
Smoked salmon & cream cheese blinis

Mini fruit and custard tarts

Close up of fruit tarts

Cookies n Cream Pie

Do American recipes make you feel frustrated?
Always insearch of new ideas I came across a gorgeous photo the other day of a cookies n creme pie made with oreo biscuits. Looked fab so I started googling recipes.
Every recipe seemed to be American and included "chocolate pudding mix" and "cool whip", both of which are not on the UK supermarket shelves.
So I did a bit more googling and came up with my own plan for a recipe.
I bought large oreo bisuits as well as snack size, cookies,butter, cream, chocolate philadelphia and then chocolate flavoured angel delight and dream topping.

I crushed the large oreos and added 30g melted butter and divided them into individual cake tins and pressed down and chilled.
Following packet instructions I made up the angel delight and dream topping and mixed it altogether with the cream cheese and added broken up cookies and small oreos. Dollops were placed on the chilled biscuits base and then I piped cream on top and finished with a mini oreo.

Cookies n Cream Oreo dessert

My son tested them this evening and gave them a thumbs up tho did say the cream probably wasn't needed on top as the 2 textures were the same and also that they didn't need to be any bigger as might be too much. For me I don't think I like the angel delight in the mixture, I was never a big fan!

Cookies n Cream Dessert

And if you fancy making the dessert a bit more portable then it looks great in this small glass jar!

Cookies n Cream Pie in a Jar