And I gladly spent a beautiful Sunday morning making my own pastry before making the sausage rolls - so tasty, even if I do say so myself.
Believe it nor not, I'm still using the pastry recipe from when I was 12 years old in cookery class in secondary school - and I honestly can't see myself ever using another recipe, or buying shop-bought, well unless I'm completely desperate for time!
This pastry recipe is quick, easy and doesn't require many ingredients - 200g of plain flour (plus extra for when you're rolling the pastry), 75g of lard, 75g of margarine, one egg and some cold water - straight from the tap.
Start off by placing the flour in a bowl. Mix the lard and margarine together and cut into four equal portions. Add the first portion to the flour and mix in with the tips of your fingers.
Now, add 8 tablespoons of cold water and use a knife to bring the mixture together - it should be sticky but easy enough to get of the bowl.
Place on a floured surface and roll out. Using the second portion of the lard/margarine mix, cut into small pieces and place over 2/3rd of the dough, fold the top 3rd into the middle, and he bottom third on top of that - this sounds so complicated, but it's actually very easy. There's no exact science to this - you just need layers!
Place the dough in the fridge for half an hour. Bring it out, roll again and do the same with the 3rd and 4th portions. And after using up all the lard/margarine, place the dough in the freezer for an hour - it won't freeze, it'll just become very cold.
At this point I normally make around 14 sausage rolls with half the dough, and leave the other half in the fridge or freezer for when I fancy making some eccles cakes - another of the Other Half's favourites.
Now, roll out the cold dough on a floured surface so that it's the thickness of a 50p piece, or thereabouts. Using a knife, score the dough so that you have around 14 (or 28 if using all the dough) strips.
Brush some egg one one end of every strip and place a small ball of sausage meat on the other - you can add salt, pepper and thyme (or whatever you fancy!) at this point.
Then, fold one end of the strip over the other and, using your fingers, squish the dough together so that the meat is sealed inside.
After doing this to each strip, place in the fridge for another half an hour.
After half an hour, score the tops of each sausage roll with a knife and brush some egg over each one before placing in the oven for 30 minutes - or until they look oh so good and brown.
And finally, dig in - yum!
And these are the sausage rolls and eccles cakes from Christmas
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