Tag Archives: food

Jan24

Cheese and Bacon Pinwheels

Posted on January 24, 2014 by TodayWeDid

It’s almost time to return to school for a new year, and I have started the back to school baking. I like to stack the freezer with various snacks and treats ready for lunchboxes, such as muffins, cakes, and slices. One of my favourites are these easy cheese and bacon pinwheels.

Yummy cheese and bacon pinwheels.

More puff pastry, my kids just love puff pastry! While the puff pastry is defrosting on the table, I gather the rest of the ingredients, which is only grated tasty cheese, diced bacon and I like to add a little grated parmesan to the top of each one before cooking them.

Laid out prior to rolling.

I spread the grated cheese over the pastry sheet, and then the bacon pieces, trying to give it a fairly even coverage. This is a great job for the kids, though I have to watch that we don’t end up with all the bacon in one corner! Then I roll the pastry from one edge up into a log, catching all the cheese and bacon inside, and pinch the edge down to seal it. The log is then cut into slices around one to two centimetres in width. These slices are placed on their sides on the baking tray (I always use baking paper on the tray for ease), I add the grated parmesan then put them in the oven until they are golden.

Rolled up ready for slicing.

Sliced up.

Ready for the oven.

These are delicious little savoury bites, and they freeze quite well, though the pastry will not be as crispy after defrosting as it would be straight from the oven.

Jan24

Pigs-in-Blankets

Posted on January 24, 2014 by TodayWeDid

Standard

Pigs-in-blankets are a great finger food for kids parties, and they are super easy to make!

Cut up into eights.

A frankfurt waiting to be rolled into its pastry blanket.

I buy the puff pastry in frozen sheets because I’m not much of a cook, and I’ve never managed to make my own puff pastry successfully. It is also much easier and quicker to buy frozen puff pastry. I let it defrost for a few minutes before cutting each piece in half across, and then in thirds or quarters lengthways, making six or eight rectangles of pastry out of each square pastry sheet. When the pastry sheets are cut into eighths, each frankfurt has a little less pastry on it, so there is a little bit of red poking out the ends of the pastry blanket.

Ready for the oven.

L helping me to roll the pigs.

Onto each piece of pastry, I placed one cocktail frankfurt and rolled them up, just like in a blanket. I pinched the edge of the pastry down, and then popped them on a tray in the oven to cook until they were puffy and golden.

Cooling down before eating.

Ready to eat!

These go down very well with the kids!

Jan22

Fruit Kebabs

Posted on January 22, 2014 by TodayWeDid

Standard

With all the lovely summer fruits out at the moment, we have been eating a lot of fruit salad. The kids would probably live on fruit if they could. Instead of just cutting up the fruit and mixing it together before adding it to bowls for everyone, today we decided to make some fruit kebabs.

It was pretty simple. I washed the fruit and cut it into chunks and put them on a tray. We had watermelon, pineapple, two types of grapes and strawberries. I left the grapes whole. Any fruit firm enough to be threaded onto skewers would have worked, but these are the fruits we are enjoying at the moment.

Threading a strawberry carefully onto her skewer.

Adding a grape.

I discovered I only had jumbo skewers, rather than the standard sized ones in the drawer, so our kebabs were a bit bigger than normal. The kids also made some mini-kebabs with toothpicks, which really only fitted a couple of pieces of fruit. Soaking the skewers in water for half an hour or so can reduce the incidence of little splinters from the skewers coming off on the fruit, but I didn’t do that today as the kids were too impatient to wait. Luckily for us, no splinters!

I let the kids make their own kebabs by threading on whatever pieces of fruit they wanted. A found this quite easy, but L often threaded her pieces of fruit too close to the edge, and some of them broke and fell off. They made a couple of kebabs each, and then there was all the fun of eating them!