b We had a visitor coming over today so I decided to make some Palmiers, also known as Palm Leaves or Elephant Ears Cookies. These are a lovely mixture of puff pastry and caramelised sugar which always looks impressive even thought they are really very simple to make.Puff pastry is quite easy and very satisfying to make, but it's quite time consuming, so if you want to make something fairly quickly then you can use preprepared puff pastry- Jus-Rol is vegan. Roll out the puff pastry, so you have a rectangle about 12 inches by 18 inches, then get a quarter of a cup of sugar and sprinkle about half of it all over the surface of the pastry, then press it in by rolling with a rolling pin. Now lift up the pastry and turn it over and sprinkle the rest of the sugar over the second side and, again, roll it with the rolling pin to press the sugar onto the surface of the pastry.
Now roll the pastry up from one of the short sides almost into the middle; not too tightly because you need to leave room for the pastry to expand when it cooks. Then roll the other side almost up to the middle too. Flatten the rolls slightly by rolling along them gently with the rolling pin. Now fold one of the rolls over on top of the other roll, like closing a book. Dampen the sides slightly with soya milk so that they stick together. The pastry should now chill for 20 minutes in the fridge; you can make yourself a fruit tea or something while you wait for your pastry to chill!!
After you have put your pastry in the fridge, and put the kettle on for a hot drink, look idly out of your kitchen window, into the garden. If you see one of your cats patting playfully at what looks like an autumn leaf, run out just to check what it actually is. If the 'leaf' turns out to be a vole, pick it up quickly and transfer it to a safe receptacle so you can examine it. Quickly (speed is REALLY important here) dissolve some homeopathic Arnica in water and then get some on the end of a clean finger or a cotton bud, then moisten the vole's mouth with it. The vole will probably look much brighter immediately. Repeat every few minutes as voles tend to suffer badly from terror and find even temporary captivity very difficult, so you need to be aiming for a safe release as soon as possible. After a few minutes, if the vole is moving freely, washing, looking about etc. take to a safe release site and let it go. If the vole shows any hesitation at this point, do not release but administer another dose of Arnica and see if the vole is now ready to leave.
Now it's time to get your pastry out and slice it into quarter inch slices. Lay them on their sides on an oiled baking sheet, sprinkle with a little more sugar if you like) and cook at 190* for 8-10 minutes. Then turn over carefully (the undersides should be turniing golden), and cook for another 8-10 minutes. When the palmiers are looking really golden take them out and allow to cool.
Our daughter Pony doesn't like palmiers and also didn't like the cheesy straws that I made her as an alternative last time, so this time, I cut some 'straw' shapes out and put them on a tray or her and she topped them herself with tomato sauce, scattered on some 'bacon bits' and then sprinkled some yeast flakes on some of them. Yeast flakes, also known as Nutritional Yeast, or 'Nooch' adds a mild cheesy taste to vegan dishes (we sell it in our shop VegaNation ), and is nice on 'buttered' toast, possibly sprinkled with a few caraway seeds..The tomato sauce looked a little blackened by the time the pastry was cooked, but I think that was because it was spread a bit thin. When our visitor arrived, who is a busy RSPCA volunteer, and well-deserving of a treat, we all enjoyed our palmiers very much and Pony pronounced her savoury straws to be excellent!
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