Strawberry Cream Cheese Danish

Description

Homemade puff pastry fresh out of the oven, combined with a sweet cream cheese and strawberry filling, is a sure winner for any lover of morning sweets.  The puff pastry itself, is a bit time-consuming to make on your own, but the results are well worth the effort once you get the chance to bite into the hundreds of delicate layers of buttery clouds of goodness.  These danishes freeze incredibly well and can be popped straight out of the freezer and into your oven for a quick and tasty anytime treat.  These photos are from my first time making puff pastry, and I’m far from being an expert at it, but I was able to achieve amazingly impressive results by using this recipe from whiteonricecouple.com.  They provide easy to follow instructions with beautiful pictures to guide you along the way.  For my first batch I cut the puff pastry recipe in half and found it to be a bit less daunting to work with…of course you can always buy puff pastry or crescent roll dough from the store if you don’t have 3 hours sit around making buttery, flakey, melt in your mouth, totally worth the effort deliciousness. 

Ingredients for 20 pastries

• 2 Pounds of puff pastry (910g)
• 8oz of cream cheese (226g)
• 6 Tablespoons of sugar (72g)
• ½ Teaspoon of vanilla extract (2.5ml)
• About 18 strawberries
• 2 Tablespoons of sugar (24g) (optional)
• Dash of cinnamon (optional)
• Splash of vanilla (optional)

Let’s make some AWESOME danishes

Prepare your puff pastry as directed and let it rest in the fridge while you prepare your filling ingredients.  In a small bowl, cream together your cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla extract until smooth, set aside.  Slice up your strawberries.  If you carelessly bought hard and under ripe strawberries like I always manage to do, make sure you sprinkle the 2T (24g) of sugar on them along with the cinnamon and vanilla to bring out their wonderful flavor…otherwise, ripe strawberries with or without the added cinnamon and vanilla are very tasty.

Working with half of your puff pastry dough, roll it out into about 20X12 inches.  Slice into 20 one inch strips.  Take two strips and twist them together.

Curl around to form a circle and press ends together.  Lightly press down in the center to make room for your filling.

Fill your pastries with the cream cheese mixture and top with sliced strawberries.  Let your finished pastries rest in the freezer while you work on the rest of them to preserve all of those buttery layers.

Once you’ve made all 20 pastries, you can either wrap and freeze them for later, or bake them at 400⁰F (205⁰C) for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so self-destructive to my diet plans…but then I bite into one of these and forget what I was thinking….