This morning we had friends around for brunch. If I do say myself, it was rather yum. I will talk about the hash browns another time, they came with the first with some more savoury items. The strudel came next and was so, so, so good. I served it with the Christmas special from The Collective Dairy – Vanilla Bean Custard. Oh blimey, they worked well together, very well. In fact so well that I saved all the crumbs and odd bits of cherries and sprinkled the on the left over for yoghurt for later.
Anyway, on to the strudel. I must confess that I used filo and didn’t spend hours making really, really thin strudel pastry. I used the filo from the fridge in the supermarket as I find it easier to work with. I filled it with cherries as I had a jar in the cupboard and I love cherries. I couldn’t get fresh ones as they would never last past getting stoned. The one things about strudel is, it is easy and you can put what ever you like in.
heat oven to 180 (160 on fan)
Ingredients
Filo pastry- 8 sheets (I used Timos)
Jar of cherries
2 apples
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 lemon
Ground almonds
Around 100 g melted butter with a teaspoon of vanilla essence added
Clean tea towel
Directions-
Drain the cherries, get as much liquid out as possible
Peel and thinly slice the apples
Add fruit to a bowl and sprinkle with cinnamon, sugar and squeeze lemon juice over (I did night before and stuck in the fridge so was all ready in the morning)
Lay the clean tea towel out and put 1 sheet of filo on it, brush with butter
Lay another sheet on top and brush again,
Lay the next sheet on and brush with butter then sprinkle some ground almonds over
Repeat until all 8 sheets have been used
Turn the sheets so the long side is horizontal
Sprinkle ground almonds in a long thin rectangle , just enough to cover ( leave a gap of 3cm from all edges and make it around 10cm high)
Put fruit mix over the almonds, try not to transfer any liquid
Grab the end of the tea towel closest to you and pull up so strudel rolls over the filo
Transfer to a baking sheet lined with baking paper, you can curl it around to fit
Bake until browned- around 40 minutes
Leave to cool slightly and sprinkle with icing sugar
Slice on the diagonal and serve warm with Vanilla Bean Custard.
There are a good few clips on YouTube about the whole strudel business, I like this one with a huge strudel-
I took a strudle-making class in Vienna once and followed up with a few attempts at home. Yours does look particularly tasty!
And yes, I used a floured linen cloth like they do in your video. Makes the rolling really easy!
I found it easy too. Just used my bread covering tea towel.
Wow, that is a very wonderful thing to say you have done. May have to put that on the bucket list.