Festive Surprise Plait

KEEN YOUNG COOK FINALIST: CHRISTOPHER FOSTER

"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

Method

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

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

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

4. Mix the flour, suet and salt

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

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

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

8. Put the cranberry sauce on top

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

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

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

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

13. Brush all the plait with egg wash

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