These are Cardamom Walnut Pastries. They are flaky little treats to fancy up your tea time. You can use store-bought puff pastry, but here I provide you with a recipe and instructions to make it from scratch. The filling is everything that's decadent in this world.
Course Dessert
Cuisine American
Prep Time 1 hourhour
Cook Time 20 minutesminutes
Resting time 5 hourshours
Total Time 1 hourhour20 minutesminutes
Servings 15pastries
Calories 180kcal
Ingredients
Puff Pastry
1 1/2cupsall-purpose flour
1/2teaspoonsalt
1/2teaspooncardamom seedsground (I like to grind whole seeds)
14tablespoonsunsalted butter 1 stick plus 6 tablespoons
6-7tablespoonsice water
Walnut Cardamom Filling
6tablespoonsbuttersoftened
1/2cupbrown sugar
1/2teaspooncardamom seedsground
1/4teaspoonnutmeg
1/2teaspooncinnamon
3/4cupwalnuts
Instructions
Puff Pastry dough
Cut butter into small 1/2” pieces and stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes.
In the bowl of a food processor add flour, salt and cardamom. Add butter to food processor and process about 10-20 times until butter pieces are almost all incorporated into flour. When butter pieces are a bit smaller than the size of a pea, it’s time to stop. Do a couple pulses at a time and keep checking.
Drizzle ice water over mixture and process 3-4 times to combine. Transfer dough to the counter and work it minimally just enough to turn it into a ball. Don’t overwork your dough, otherwise it will be tough and not as flaky.
Form mixture into a 7 inch square, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, remove dough from the fridge and roll it out into a large rectangle, measuring about 16x10”. Fold it letter style, wrap it and refrigerate it again. Folding the dough letter style means you’ll think of the widest side of the dough as divided into 3 parts, then you are going to fold one end all the way up to 2/3 of the length and then fold the other end over.
After 30 minutes, do the same thing again, now rolling the dough from the open sides. Fold it letter style and refrigerate again. Repeat this once more after 30 minutes. And then, refrigerate the dough for a couple hours before using.
Finally, you can roll the dough out to a 16”x10” rectangle, roughly.
Brush filling evenly over the whole surface.
Fold like letter style again. Bring the narrow bottom to 2/3 of the way and then fold the other 1/3 piece over dough. Just like you fold a letter.
Using a pizza cutter, cut strips of dough about 1/2” thick. Refer to the post for pictures.
Roll each strip of dough by holding the left side of a strip and rolling the right side over itself, against the counter, towards you. (Again, refer to pictures on the post)
Now, make a pinwheel with each twirled strip.
Place it on a baking sheet and freeze for 15 minutes while you pre-heat the oven.
Pre-heat oven to 375F.
Bake pastries for 10-15 minutes, check in between. Remove from the oven once pastries are golden brown.
The fresher you eat it, the better. Store for up to a day in air-tight container and re-heat it in the oven for 5 minutes at 350F before eating it again.
Walnut Cardamom Filling
Start with the walnuts, if your walnuts aren’t roasted, make sure to roast them first. Spread walnuts in a baking sheet and roast on pre-heated 350F oven for 5-10 minutes, until slightly golden.
Grind nuts in a food processor until they are coarse. You don’t want huge pieces, but you don’t want it to be a paste. You still want a lot of texture in your filling.