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-

The roll