Party Preparations 2

On the Wednesday, I made pizza rolls. This is the same principle as with the cinnamon buns, but is done on a pizza instead. I made the pizza base in the bread machine and I made two lots - one with meat and one without.

Sadly the first lot was way too soft and the rolling was quite tricky and cutting the twirls was even more so and messy too. For the second lot I used a very generous amount of additional flour and worked a bit better, but I took too long to do the whole process and it went soggy and just as messy. Once in the oven though, things sorted themselves out. Next time I think I'll try the much stiffer wholemeal base instead, it should make things a lot simpler.

So the trick is to make the tomato sauce very very think. I used 2 cans of tomatoes and drained them, to speed up things a bit. The onions were chopped very finely and I also sliced some canned mushrooms and added to the sauce, again well drained. The cooker was quite orange from all the spluttering, but the sauce was as thick as a paste.

Then I rolled the dough into a rectangle and spread the paste apart from a 10 cm wide strip along one of the longer sides, which would end up as the outer edge of the roll. For the meaty pizza I cut pepperoni into small pieces and added some capers before rolling it and slicing. Each twirl was then placed in fairy cake paper forms, decorated with a slice of jalapeno, an olive and a thin piece of parmesan and baked at gas mark 6 (220 degrees C) until it got a nice colour. For the vegetarian ones, I used sweet corn and pickled roasted pepper strips, but with the same decoration. They didn't look as pretty as I'd hoped for, but worked quite well and were very moorish. On the whole, I should also have cut the mushrooms smaller too. And the paper forms were not very good either - they soaked up a lot of grease, some of it orange tinged from the tomato sauce and it didn't look nice at all. Perhaps I'll try without them next time.