Spiced puff pastry crescents

I bought this recipe for … with a jar of my home-preserved fig jam. So I’ll hand you over to its author 🙂

“A quick and easy recipe (thank goodness it isn’t fast and furious too – note from PrymitywnaKuchnia.pl ;)), so the introduction will be primitive too. These are emergency crescents. You can make them in a flash when you suddenly need a dessert – for guests who turn up unannounced, or guests who did announce themselves but whom you forgot about…

Of course, not everybody keeps a stash of puff pastry at home, but these days just about every shop sells it ready-made, so you can always nip out for some in a pinch. As for jam, everybody ought to have at least one jar of some kind at home (well, Kaja will definitely have one for this recipe, sob, and I’ll have one less 🙁 – note from PrymitywnaKuchnia.pl).

I had both the pastry and the jam, freshly made and scented with spice – hence the spiced crescents this time. Let’s get to it.”

At a glance: 

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Baking time: 20 minutes

Oven temperature: 180 degrees Celsius

Yield: 16 tiny crescents

Calories: quite a few (Kaja is learning Japanese – note from PrymitywnaKuchnia.pl)

Ingredients for last-minute crescents:

• 1 pack of puff pastry
•  1 jar of jam (whichever kind you like)
•  A tablespoon of cane sugar
•  A teaspoon of cinnamon
•  1 egg

Recipe for spiced crescents:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line a baking tray with a sheet of baking paper. Unroll the pastry on the worktop, cut it lengthways, then cut it into smaller squares – there should be eight.

Next, cut the squares diagonally into triangles. That should give you 16 triangles (more or less even… mine were less so). Put a teaspoon of jam near the base of each triangle (meaning not at the tip). Then just roll the triangle up from the base to the tip and bend it a little to make a crescent.

I wasn’t very good at that bit. My crescents looked as though they’d been hit by a train. I put the rolled-up “crescents” on the tray, brushed them with beaten egg and sprinkled them generously with the sugar I’d mixed with the cinnamon. Bake the crescents for 20 minutes. And that’s it.

Once baked, the crescents actually look pretty good (beautiful would be putting it a bit strongly. I think I still need to practise the rolling). They look nothing like those mangled crescents any more. Enjoy!