This week I was challenged to a sausage roll bake off.  Time was a bit tight so  I made a quick flaky pastry.  It’s a case of grating very cold butter over the flour and mixing together with a little bit of water and leaving to rest for half an hour in the fridge before rolling out.

My sausage meat was made up of mince pork with some finely chopped sage and mint added.  I like to keep my sausage rolls simple and traditional.  The meat is then placed onto the rolled out pastry which is then folded over the meat and the edge sealed to keep in the sausage meat.  Then to finish off I glaze the pastry with egg yolk to give the sausage rolls a lovely rich golden finish.

Pop in the oven for 25 minutes before everybody makes a grab for them.

As for the winner I think the conclusion was it was a draw.

This week I put my hand to making macaroons.  Everything I have read about macaroons says they are hard to master and they are right…….. mine were a total flop they didn’t even rise.

I did everything the recipe said but they just didn’t rise.  From what I can learn there are all sorts of reasons why they didn’t rise such as eggs not whipped enough, too heavy handed when folding in the egg whites, undercooked and so on.  I don’t think I am going to ever know what I did wrong and for now this goes down as a disaster and something I need to try again.

So this week there was no nice Sunday afternoon treat.