Blueberry Hydrangea

In honour of our launch date and my first post, I would like to introduce the Blueberry Hydrangea, a dessert that I had concocted just this afternoon for our family's Thanksgiving Dinner. You'll probably see a holiday discrepancy later on, as American Thanksgiving takes place in November (if I remember correctly). The name of the dessert, Blueberry Hydrangea stems from the fact that it looks like well, the Hydrangea, pictured here:

Pastry:

1 cup butter

2 cups flour

1 tbsp sugar

1tsp salt

2/3 cups cold water

For this dessert, I started with a pastry dough. After adding and mixing the dry ingredients together, I cut in the butter until it was all crumbly and then added the water to form the dough.

After the dough ball has been formed, roll it out on a flat, floured surface with a floured rolling pin. Just a warning, this pastry is quite flaky and therefore a bit of a pain to work with. However, it

is very delicious and once you get past the crumbly, flaky, sticky mess and finally get a nice flat sheet of pastry, you will be glad you stuck it out. I would roll the dough to a thickness of quarter 1/4". Then cut it into squares.

As you can see, I used a pizza cutter. This is because it made my lines cleaner and the cutting easier.

After you get a square, pop it into a very small, shallow muffin tin with the corners poking up. Your first hydrangea! This batch make enough for 24 small cups. Pop them in the fridge while you preheat the oven to 375 degrees and start the filling. Bake the shells for 20 minutes or until golden brown, like so. Even the bottoms of the pastry should be a little browned!

Now for the filling, pictured on the right.

1 tbsp butter

3 cups frozen blueberries

3 tbsp sugar

2 tsp lemon juice

2 tbsp cream cheese

2 tbsp flour

In a saucepan, heat butter on high heat until melted. Throw in berries, sugar, lemon juice and cream cheese. You can lower the heat a little here. Once the berries have thawed and heated up, you'll notice a gorgeous juice bubbling. You can add the flour here to thicken it up.

And once the shells have cooled, gently (and I mean very gently) spoon the filling in and garnish with a tiny mint leaf. Tada! Serve with whipped cream (trust me on this one!).

That concludes the inaugural post.. stay tuned!