Final Post Before Christmas: Finnish Christmas Stars

This is my last post before Christmas and my last recipe until at least mid-January.  I’m going to finish of the year with some Finnish Christmas Stars (I didn’t realise that pun until just now 🙂  ) that I made to take to our street party.  Finnish Christmas Stars (Joulutorttu) are very to easy to make, you can use any kind of pastry and any kind of filling.  Traditionally they are made with plum or prune jam, but that was out.   I could have just used pear or apple jam, but I wanted something a bit more festive, so I made up a pear filling with brown sugar, citric acid and maple syrup.  I also used a few saffron threads to get a deeper colour into the mix, but you can leave this out.  My pears were getting to that almost too ripe point (where they become tasteless) so I cooked them up a couple of days earlier, which was  great because the flavours had more time to develop.  I also used up four different lots of pastry that were in my freezer – 2 types of butter puff pastry, some Pampas shortcrust pastry (full of colours and additives – not for Oscar) and the sweet shortcrust pastry that I made at the pie course I went to.  The best Christmas Stars were made with my own shortcrust pastry, but the puff pastry was pretty good too.

There wasn’t room in the recipe template to include all the photo steps for making the stars, so here are they are:

You can also make the star first and put the filling on top:

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As I said, this is my last recipe post for a while, but I will be around on Facebook and replying to comments, so please leave comments and ask questions.  If you’ve only just found my blog and/or are looking for Christmas ideas, check out my Christmas page.  To all my readers, I hope you all have a safe and happy Christmas and New Year, and partake of some wonderful food!

Merry Christmas and Best Wishes for 2013

Sandra