Recipe | Chocolate hazelnut pastry twists

Crunchy, flaky puff pastry with a smooth chocolate hazelnut filling.

I was looking for easy thing to bake with the assistance of a toddler. I think I Googled “easy baking with kids” or something similar, and I came across this recipe at Kidspot.

This recipe uses shop-bought frozen puff pastry (defrosted prior to baking). Of course, if you want to make your own puff pastry, you can and I take my hat off to you!

I made the mistake of cutting my pastry strips too thick (more of that later), but the results were still very tasty.

Ingredients

A packet of frozen ready-made puff pastry (or 2 sheets of it, if you’re lucky enough to be able to find it already in sheets!)
3-4 tablespoons of chocolate hazelnut spread (as long as you have half a jar in the cupboard, you’ll be fine).

Method

Line two large baking trays with baking paper. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C (160 degrees C fan) / Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F.

If you have a block of puff pastry, cut it in half. On a floured surface, use a rolling pin to roll your pastry into two equally sized rectangles. Roll the pastry very thin, about 2 mm. Spread a layer of chocolate hazelnut spread onto one of your rectangles.

Put the “clean” sheet of puff pastry on top of the chocolatey one. Roll them together lightly using the rolling pin. You’re doing this just to make sure they’ve stuck together, not to make the rectangle any bigger.

Cut your puff pastry sandwich into strips. As you can see from the picture below, I cut the strips about 1.5 cm thick. When I make these again I’ll be cutting them half this width at 75mm because 1.5cm-width strips puffed up lots to produce final twists which were a little thick for my liking.

Pick up a puff pastry strip. Holding it at each end, twist it a few times until you have a spiral. Put it on the baking tray and repeat with the other strips. You can also double the strips back on themselves – you can see I’ve tried this with the two strips in the top right hand corner of the picture below.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until the pastry has risen and is golden brown. The next photo shows the chocolate hazelnut twists fresh from the oven. As you can see, once the pastry has puffed up, the resulting twists were a rather thick. So remember to cut each of the strips to a width which suits you, expecting them to double in size during baking.