Pieday continued

As I mentioned, I had various pastries to use up in the fridge, one met its doom over my mince and mushroom pie.

What I also had was some sheets of filo pastry, left over from a spinach pie I made a while back. I'd sealed them nicely in two bags, so they were in pretty good shape.

Here too, I was inspired by the Hairy Bikers and their pie book - there is a whole chapter about suggestions on what to do with leftover pastry.

What they suggest doing with filo pastry is to cut into smallish rectangles, brush with melted butter, spoon a strip of chocolate/hazelnut spread and roll up and bake. And this is precisely what I did, except that I didn't have spread, but used Viennese nougat instead.

Ingredients
Filo pastry cut into rectangles, about 10 x 12 cm
Viennese nougat cut into thin strips (8 cm long, 0.5 x 0.5 cm wide)
25 g butter
icing sugar for dusting

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees C (200 for fan-assisted oven).
2. Very gently melt the butter, so that it doesn't start bubbling. Remove from the heat
3. Cut up the strips of Viennese nougat. This is easier if the nougat is cold from the fridge.
   
4. Cut the filo pastry rectangles and stack together, to prevent them from drying out too quickly.
5. Brush a filo rectangle with a little butter, then place a strip of nougat along the 12 cm side, so that there are a couple of cm of filo on each side of the nougat.
6. Start rolling up the nougat, after a full turn, tuck in the sides, then continue to roll up the rest of the pastry. This prevents the filling from leaking out during baking.
   
7. Place the rolls on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and bake until golden brown.
   
8. Take out and let cool on a wire rack.

These were quite fiddly to make, but once I got into the rhythm, it worked OK. Sadly my oven is playing up a lot these days and I didn't pay attention enough, so I ended up burning them. I also erred on the baking temperature and baked at 200 degrees, which perhaps contributed to burning the filo rolls - filo pastry takes longer to bake than one might think and at the same time, Viennese nougat is quite sensitive to baking, so I think baking at 220 should do the trick, provided one keeps an eye on them. It hasn't stopped me from eating these, that's for sure.