Cheese Pastries

I love anything with cheese in it, especially cheese pastries, pies, well anything that’s baked. I made these pastries savory, but I needed to put something in the middle so I decided to go with a little bit of blueberry jam. The rest of the pastry is savory and it’s just so good. I used feta and ricotta cheese in the filling and that’s all. I like mixing ricotta and feta together, because feta is very salty and ricotta is bland, so when you pair them together, they are perfect, which makes for a wonderful savory cheese pastry. The pastry dough itself is also very light and fluffy and goes wonderfully with the cheese.

Just like making any dough, I started by activating the yeast, so in a small bowl, combine the water, yeast and sugar, mix then let it sit for about 10 minutes until the yeast starts bubbling.

In another bowl, melt the butter in a microwave for a few seconds then add the egg to it and mix.

In the bowl of your mixer add the flour and salt and slowly mix it all together. Add the yeast mixture and the butter and egg mixture and mix it all up until it’s all well incorporated. The dough will be fairly soft. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, tossing the dough around so that it gets oily all around. Cover it up with a clean kitchen towel and let it rest in a warm place until it doubles in size.

While the dough is resting, you can mix the feta cheese and ricotta cheese together. After about an hour or so your dough should look something like this:

As I mentioned the dough will be soft, do not be tempted to add extra flour. Cut the dough into 4 pieces and roll each piece into a ball.

Now I made my cheese pastries fairly big, so feel free to make them more dainty and cut the dough into 8 pieces to make 8 pretty flowers. Roll out each piece so that it’s about 4 inches in diameter. Add a quarter of the cheese filling in the middle of the rolled out dough.

Fold up the dough to completely cover up the cheese, so that it forms a ball again.

Flatten out the ball again, so that it’s about 4 inches in diameter.  Using a sharp knife cut 4 slits into it, leaving about an inch in the middle uncut.

Now inside each quarter, cut 2 more slits.

Repeat with the other balls. Place the pastries carefully on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a silpat. Let the pastries rest for another 30 minutes and they will rise some more. Brush them with the egg wash, and in the middle make an indentation and drop a tablespoon of blueberry jam.

Now bake these beauties in a preheated oven at 375 F degrees for about 45 minutes or until nice and golden brown and trust me you will surely impress your family and friends and will look like a real baker.

Enjoy!