Pistachio pinwheels

I'm taking a mental health day off work today, and got the urge to bake something. But without prior planning and also without a huge amount of attention span available (see: mental health day), I had to find something to bake that looked pretty easy and could be done from store cupboard ingredients. Time for the next recipe from Dessert Person! I'm doing a half-quantity batch of this, because I don't actually have a food processor, and only have a small food chopper with a 1 litre bowl, and I was worried about it fitting. In hindsight, that wouldn't actually have been a problem, although the food chopper itself doesn't do a fantastic job as a food processor - though with a little patience, it was adequate.

Pistachio Pinwheels

Ingredients

• 45g Shelled pistachios (I used salted roasted ones - not sure if that's what was intended though!)
• 85g Butter
• 53g Icing sugar
• 1 Egg yolk
• 1/2tsp Almond extract
• 65g Plain flour
• 1.5g Salt (1ml of generic fine table salt)
• 80g Ground almonds

Method

1. Blitz the pistachios until finely ground but not a paste, and then remove to a bowl.
2. Blitz the butter and sugar together until smooth.
3. Add the egg yolk and almond extract and blitz until smooth.
4. Add the flour and salt and blitz into a uniform dough, scraping down as needed.
5. Remove 2/3rds of the dough (~140g) to a mixing bowl and mix with the ground almonds.
6. Place the dough between two sheets of baking parchment and roll out into a ~15cm x 20cm rectangular slab, around 6mm thick.
7. Place the parchment-sandwiched slab on a baking tray and refrigerate for ~15mins.
8. Add the ground pistachios to the remainder of the dough in the food processor and blitz until mixed. Leave at room temperature.
9. Remove the almond dough slab from the fridge and spread the pistachio dough evenly over the top.
10. Roll the two layers tightly into a log.
11. Wrap the log in baking parchment and refrigerate for at least one hour.
12. Roll the log in sugar, then slice into ~12mm thick biscuits.
13. Bake on baking parchment-lined trays at 165C for 15-20 mins until golden around the edges.
14. Remove from oven and allow to cool fully on the trays.

I've never actually been very good at rolling dough out neatly

Truth be told, I'm not terribly good at rolling pastry up either!

I just eyeballed the thickness slicing, and am pretty pleased that I managed to nail it pretty much perfectly. In theory, I should have had just over 16 complete slices.

Action shot!

Fresh from the oven. Pretty, aren't they?

These are really rather nice. They look beautiful - far prettier than most of my baking, and certainly they look more impressive than the effort that was actually required. The texture's quite shortbread-like - perhaps they could have done with a teeny bit longer in the oven though, as they're still slightly soft in the middle. The flavour's good too, but the pistachio flavouring is quite subtle, though you can certainly taste it. It's a tad over-salted; I did think that perhaps using salted pistachios might cause that issue, but I was pretty much guessing how much salt to add anyway. It's not awful, but if I did it again, I'd probably double the quantities back to the original scaling, but maybe not increase the amount of salt at all.

Easter baking

It's the long Easter weekend, and I'm finally getting around to doing some (light) baking. I'm also very excited because I've just got a copy of  Claire Saffitz's Dessert Person, and  it looks fantastic. I've got very little energy at the moment, partly from being ill, and partly from having done a whole heap of DIY stuff today, but having a stand mixer and a dishwasher is like having a cheat mode for simple baking. I happened to pick up some halvah with cocoa in Lidl the other day, so I thought I'd give this recipe from my new book a go, despite the fact that I really don't like white chocolate.

Salted Halvah Blondies

Ingredients

• 170g White chocolate
• 115g Unsalted butter
• 70g Tahini
• 100g Dark brown sugar
• 1 Egg
• 2 Egg yolks
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract
• 165g Plain flour
• 3g Salt
• 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 115g Halvah
• Sesame seeds
• Flaked salt

Method

1. Melt the white chocolate, butter and tahini together in the microwave.
2. Whisk the sugar in using a stand mixer. Add the egg, egg yolks and vanilla extract and whisk on medium-high until thick, smooth and glossy.
3. Fold in the flour, salt and baking powder using a spatula.
4. Crumble in the halvah and fold in gently.
5. Spread out into a greased, foil-lined tin.
6. Sprinkle top with sesame seeds and flaked salt.
7. Bake at ~175C for 20 minutes until golden brown around the edges and slightly jiggly in the centre.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool fully in the tin before removing and slicing.

As you can see, it's a pretty thick batter.

I almost forgot to sprinkle the sesame seeds and salt over the top before it went in the oven.

A rare occasion where the oven glass is clean enough to take an awfully blurry in-progress shot!

And fresh from the oven!

The finished article.

These are really quite good. They are hideously rich - incredibly fatty and perhaps bordering on greasy at times - but also delicious. You can really taste the sesame - the sesame flavour is really strong (in a good way). I'm not always a huge fan of salted desserts, but this time around, it's just perfect - the salt helps cut through the fat and the sesame, and just stops it from being too cloying. And you can't really taste the white chocolate at all, but it absolutely adds to the richness and smoothness of this. You also can't really detect the halva - I wonder if I crumbled it up a bit too small; I think the idea was that you'd come across chunks of halva, much as you would with chocolate chunks in brownies. But overall, this was lovely - as someone who's never been much of a fan of blondies, this recipe stands out as one of the best I've had.