Butterfly Pastry

One of the great things about my mom coming to visit is things like this magically happen…

We made butterfly pastries, sometimes they are called elephant ears. Or better known to you food snobs out there, palmiers. Way back when I was little, we would visit my grandparents in Santa Fe. Each morning my grandfather would get up early (as old people tend to do), go to the french bakery and bring back a bag of these wonderfully sugary pastries. They looked like butterflys to me so that’s what we called them.

This weekend my mom came to visit and we made a batch. Here’s how.

This is all you need. Seriously. One cup of sugar, a package of frozen puff pastry and a rolling pin. There are two pastry sheets in this package (make sure you thaw it out in the fridge). We used both of them and it made about 27 pastries. Heat oven to 450.

Sprinkle about half of the sugar on to your work surface. Lay out the pastry and sprinkle the remaining sugar on the pastry. There is no such thing as too much sugar here.

Roll out the pastry so that the sugar is pressed in and you have added about an inch all around. I don’t have exact measurements, sorry.

Fold the sides in. That’s about three inches of fold on each side. Then fold again and again until you have one long rectangle.

You should have 6 to 8 layers. You may have to adjust the width and number of folds to get it right. I have confidence you can figure it out. Our first pastry sheet only had 5 layers. It worked fine but didn’t turn out as pretty as this one that had 8 layers.

Use a serrated knife and slice the pastry into 1 inch sections.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the pastries like so leaving room for them to grow.

Put them in your oh so hot oven and bake for 8 minutes. You need to watch them because you will need to turn them over when they are just starting to brown. For some ovens 8 minutes may be too long.

These were just a tad too brown but still wonderful. The next batch we only baked the first side for 6 minutes.

After you flip them set the timer for 3 minutes. During this 3 minutes do your best to get the sugar off the spatula. It turns hard as a rock immediately so good luck.

After 3 minutes is up IMMEDIATELY transfer them to a rack to cool. Then get the next batch in the oven and work on that spatula.

Is there anything more beautiful? I think not. These go PERFECT with a cup of coffee.

For you food snobs out there who are turning up your noses at this because it uses pre-packaged pastry dough…I’d like to point out that frozen pastry dough is Ina Garten’s method of choice. That’s right, Ina Garten.  So, sit on it.