Apricot Bow-Ties

I have very mixed feelings about these little treats.  On the one hand, they taste like a million bucks.  One the other hand, they look like freaky crap.

Basically you take a half batch of Danish Dough and roll it out, then cut individual squares.  Onto these individual square pieces, you place a dollop of Pastry Cream and then top with two apricot halves (the MSBH instructs the use of canned apricot halves and they seem to work wonderfully).

The squares are folded into bow-ties and allowed to proof before baking.

During the baking process, all my bow-ties unfolded, making these less apricot bow-ties and more apricot canoes. I don’t see how this could be remedied, as I took great care to avoid the problems I encountered when I made the Cheese Danishes.  I was careful not to fill the individual pastries too full, I didn’t wrap them too tightly, and I made sure that the dough was moist and pinched together securely.

The proofing allows the pastries to warm considerably before baking, so perhaps they should be chilled a bit just before putting in the oven (that old pastry adage about pastries: hot oven, cold dough)?

Despite the final product looking like two sunny-side-up eggs on a weird piece of curly toast, they taste really good.  Like, phenomenally good.  The apricots sync very well with the vanilla Pastry Cream and as always, the buttery flaky danish dough itself is divine.

So I’ll give it some thought and see if I can’t figure out a better presentation for these.  They really deserve a better presentation – at the very least something less akin to the old  egg in a basket.

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