Bacon and goats’ cheese cruffins

The combined flavour of salty, spiced bacon, creamy goats’ cheese and buttery pastry is hard to beat and these are fast becoming one of my “go to” savoury bites.

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These savoury pastries are essentially croissant dough baked in muffin tins (cruffins). They have an intense umami flavour and it really is difficult to stop at just one!

I dust these with a mixture of salt, sugar and smoked paprika which gives an exciting flavour as you taste them: your taste buds really start to come alive.

Although croissant-related pastries are best eaten on the same day, these can be made and filled a couple of days ahead (or even frozen!), and kept in an airtight container in the fridge. When you reheat them, the pastries “freshen up” and become beautifully crisp.

An addictive filling!

I mix bacon jam* with soft goats’ cheese, just a little garlic and a few chives, to give the most wonderful creamy filling.

When I am ready to serve these pastries I heat them up in the oven – just enough to warm them right through: the flavours develop with the heat and takes on a luscious sauce-like consistency. Heavenly!

*Bacon jam is a staple ingredient in my house: salty, sweet and spicy, a little goes a long way. It is also so easy to make. The recipe for the bacon jam is here.

Croissant dough

Many of you know how much I adore making croissant dough – it remains up there in my favourite couple of things to make – and I hope I am not going too far by saying these bacon and goats’ cheese pastries are the top of my croissant-related bakes!

I vary between two recipes for croissant dough: the more traditional recipe – taking the best part of a weekend to make, but yielding the best results – or the shortcut recipe that takes about 20 minutes or so to get the dough laminated.

The recipes for these two croissant doughs are below:

• full-on croissant dough
• the shortcut croissant dough

For these cruffins I used the shortcut recipe which, as I hope you can see from the photos, works very well indeed.

You can instead use all-butter puff pastry from the supermarket which gives fabulous results, baking them for about 15-20 minutes.

Shaping the dough

There are several ways to shape the dough and I have given full details, with photos, at my earlier cruffin link here.

Mind you, just taking small thin rectangles of dough, rolling up with the cut side upwards works wonderfully, too.

I sometimes like to make these quite large, but at other times I go much smaller in miniature muffin tins, to serve almost as canapés.

Recipe: bacon and goats’ cheese pastries – makes about 10 large ones or 20 small ones

Dough:

• about half a batch of croissant dough (see links above)

Spice blend:

• 2 tablespoon caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Filling:

• 150g soft goats’ cheese
• 2 tablespoons bacon jam
• 1 small cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• a few chives, finely chopped

To finish:

• 1-2 tablespoons bacon jam
• fresh chives, chopped
• a dusting of the spice blend, above

(1) Roll out the croissant dough thinly to a rectangle about 18cm by 45cm and trim the edges. Cut into five rectangles about 18cm by 9cm.

(2) Make the spice blend by mixing the ingredients together. Sprinkle over the rectangles of dough and pat down lightly to help some of it stick.

(3) Shape as in the earlier cruffin post (here), or else cut each rectangle in half lengthways to give long strips of dough and roll these up.

(4) Pop the shaped dough into deep muffin tins that have been buttered well, with a small square of greaseproof in the base (to ensure the pastries will not stick once baked!)

(5) Place the muffin tin(s) into a large bin liner and leave at room temprature or in a slightly warm room to prove until about doubled in size or until they fill up the muffin tins nicely.

(6) Place in an oven preheated to 200C (fan) and immediately turn down the oven to 170C. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until well risen and nicely golden.

(7) Remove from the oven and put the pastries onto a cooling rack. Dust with more of the spice blend and leave to cool fully.

To fill and finish:

(1) Mix the filling ingredients together until fairly smooth. Spoon into a piping bag with a medium nozzle (ideally a round nozzle)

(2) Make a small hole in the top of each pastry and pipe some of the filling into each hole until it comes to the top. Pipe a little mound of the filling on the top.

(3) Spoon over a little bacon jam

(4) When you ready to eat the pastries, warm them for 10 mins or so at about 170C.