KEEN YOUNG COOK FINALIST: CHRISTOPHER FOSTER

Festive Surprise Plait

"It was difficult to choose a bake as I love to bake lots of different cakes, meringues, pastries and bread. However, I decided in the end to make a sausage plait as sausage plaits are a signature dish of mine that everyone likes to eat. I like to do my own thing with them by adding my own preserves to make them interesting."

Ingredients

Filling:

  • Half an onion chopped

  • 1 tablespoon Mellow Yellow Rapeseed Oil 

  • 200g Local Lincolnshire Sausagemeat

  • 75g Chestnuts roughly chopped

  • 1 tablespoon homemade cranberry sauce

  • 2 slices chopped bacon

  • 1 large British Bramley cooking apple, peeled and cored and thinly sliced

  • 1 tablespoon sugar

  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon

  • 2 tablespoons homemade mincemeat

 

Pastry:

  • 300g self raising flour sieved

  • 150g beef suet

  • 200 ml water (approx.)

  • 1 local free range egg beaten

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Method

1. Fry the onion in a little rapeseed oil and leave to cool

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2. Mix together the sausage meat, chestnuts, bacon and onion

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3. Mix together the apples, sugar, cinnamon and mincemeat

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4. Mix the flour, suet and salt

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5. Add water to the flour and mix with a knife until it becomes a soft pliable dough

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6. Roll out into a rectangle - cut the edges to neaten, and keep the spare for pastry for decorating

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7. Place the the sausage meat filling down the centre of the pastry and stop half way

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8. Put the cranberry sauce on top

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9. Put a small amount of pastry at the end of the sausage meat

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10. Place the apples down the centre of the pastry and stop half way

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11.Cut the pastry down the sides, brush the sides with beaten egg

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12. Fold the strips of pastry into a plait. Decorate the top with festive cutters

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13. Brush all the plait with egg wash

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14. Bake for 30 mins at Gas Mark 6 or until golden brown

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