"Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree how lovely is your flaky pastry!", that's what you'll be singing once you try this incredibly fancy yet easy to make puff pastry Christmas tree tart. I used this recipe for inspiration but cheated and bought the ready made Jus Rol puff pastry sheets instead. They cook in 10 mins, are vegan and have no natural flavourings yippee.
I filled mine with savoury spinach but you can add whatever you fancy, you could even make it sweet and serve with ice cream for your Christmas dessert, mmm!
Ingredients (makes 2 trees):
- 1 pack of Jus Rol puff pastry
- Small bag of spinach
- 1 white onion
- 1 shallot
- Large handful of pine nuts
- Garlic and herb toffuti (approx 2 tbsp per tree)
- Rular for measuring if you like to be exact!
Instructions:
1.) Cut the pastry sheet in half. Use a ruler to measure the middle of your sheet and put a little notch with your knife (being careful not to cut through). On either side of the notch score the pastry up 1.5" again don't cut through the pastry, this is your tree stump.
2.) Mark the top middle of your pastry with a knife for the tree top, then mark the bottom tree points half way in between the stump and the edge of the pastry.
3.) Join up your 3 points by scoring the pastry into a triangle tree shape.
4.) Cut the bottom squares off your pastry (after the bottom tree points - see pic below) and the top corners (so there's a slope), this is extra so you can use it to make something else if you wish.
5.) Measure the length of your tree sides and divide by 7 for your branches, notch where the line should start on your tree side and score across with your ruler.
6.) Spread your tofutti on the tree (covering the whole triangle shape), next add your filling on top - make sure you don't overfill or add something that's too wet. I used kitchen towel to remove the moisture from my sautéed spinach mix.
7.) Wrap the branches over the tree, left and then right overlapping each other like a plait (see below).
8.) When you get to the last two branches fold under the two large bottom squares.
9.) Turn up the last two branches slightly before wrapping over. Make sure there're no gaps for your filling to spill out.
10.) Pop in the oven according to your Jus Rol instructions. I also popped mine under the grill to broil the top golden brown for a few minutes (be careful not to burn it at this stage, it goes brown pretty quickly!)
11.) The trees are quite large so you could always cut them in two and serve with roasted vegetables, mash etc depending on your filling.
This tree would make an impressive table centre piece for a boxing day buffet dontcha think?
