Puff Pastry ‘Christmas Trees’
Forget the bread, this Christmas we are breaking branches of delicious ricotta and pumpkin filled puff pastry with our family and friends!
Since we’ve mastered our Easy Cheesy Ricotta recipe we’ll never go back to store bought ricotta as we just can’t match the smooth, creamy flavour that our Farm Milk lends to this cheese-that and also because it is so much quicker and easier to make it at home than it is to take a trip into town to buy some.
The delicious flavour of ricotta blends beautifully with the roasted pumpkin and spinach in this very tasty and addictive dish-you may not be able to stop breaking off those branches.
This recipe could also be made into lovely little sausage rolls throughout the year.
Ingredients:
250 G Ricotta (see our quick and easy ricotta recipe)
1/2 Pumpkin, diced
200 G Spinach
1 Onion
1 Garlic clove, minced
1 Teaspoon salt and pepper
6 Sheets of puff pastry
150 G Danish Feta
1 Egg, beaten for brushing
2 Teaspoons of white sesame seeds
Use fresh, home made ricotta in this festive dish to share!
Method:
Pre heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius
Place pumpkin on a baking tray, drizzle with olive oil and salt and cook until softened (about 30 minutes)
In a frying pan, lightly cook onion for 10 minutes then add garlic and fry for a further 1 minute. Add Spinach and let wilt.
Defrost puff pastry.
Place pumpkin, onion, garlic, spinach, ricotta and feta into a bowl and stir to combine.
Place one sheet of puff pastry on top of another (keep plastic to avoid sticking together) and using a knife cut a line from the bottom corners to the middle at the top of the sheet to create a triangle shape.
Place one sheet onto a tray lined with baking paper and cover the triangle with the pumpkin and ricotta mixture to a height of roughly 2 cms.
Peel the remaining triangle from the plastic and place on top of the pumpkin mixture.
Looking at your tree, imagine a trunk down the centre that is roughly 1 cm wide. To make the branches, start at the base of the tree and make horizontal cuts each side of the imaginary trunk every 2 cms until you reach the top of the tree.
Gently twist each branch.
Use a cookie cutter to cut a star and other decorations out of the remaining puff pastry and decorate your tree! Brush with egg and sprinkle sesame seeds.
Repeat for the remaining sheets of puff pastry (this recipe makes roughly 3 trees, depending on how much you fill the trees)
Place into the oven and cook for 40 minutes or until pastry has puffed and browned.
For those of you wanting to have a go at making your own ricotta to use in this recipe, we’ve put the video down below for you, or visit our Easy Cheesy Ricotta blog post for the full recipe and video.