Pinterest convinced me baking would be easy….

I should preface this by saying I never bake. I don’t do anything in the kitchen other than make myself a bowl of cereal. But the other week I happened to see one of those short videos on pinterest of someone making pastries where they make everything look super easy and very pretty.

And I was like…. I could do that…?

So I told my parents about it and they dutifully got the ingredients, and by that I mean a pre-rolled piece of puff pastry and some cream cheese.

Loads of ingredients, right? This sounds so complicated haha.

And last weekend everything lined up. I hadn’t done anything big that week, I happened to have nothing else going on (and by that I mean no sports to watch) and was also feeling rather okay. I know that sounds so mild but honestly that’s a brilliant day for me as a lot of the time I’ve either slept badly, am sneezy, have a sore throat, am really tired… So on and so forth. But whenever there is something mildly wrong I have to rest rather than do. So the fact that everything lined up and I was able to give it a go before I psyched myself out was great.

Now the video was of fruit filling but I don’t like fruit pastries so I decided to make some with filings I normally like too. (This is where it gets more complicated.) Which means nutella and lemon curd (separately not together because eww).

I made mum mix the cream cheese filing with some sugar, vanilla extract and lemon juice. (I didn’t do it because a) energy, but mainly b) cream cheese looks disgusting and it turned my stomach). At this point mum was extremely anxious at the fact I didn’t have a recipe and she had no idea what I was doing. She was fully expecting disaster and for me to have a meltdown when things started going wrong. I’m pretty sure she left the kitchen at one point just so she could calm down. Poor mum.

But I took the pastry out and got fiddling with my knife and, would you believe it, nothing went horribly wrong!

I started by making these blueberry….. Diamonds? Lattice… Things? They looked really pretty and were actually super easy. I guess the Pinterest video didn’t lie!

Looking at them after they were baked, I could have put a lot more blueberries in but it looked rather full before it puffed up!

Then I went on to some braids.

These were stuffed with either lemon curd or nutella and chocolate chips. This was MUCH messier but, rather amazingly because I highly doubted them as they went in the oven, they kept their shape and didn’t explode! Second success!

After that, and having seen how well the blueberries turned out, my mum demanded I make some more fruit ones for them to eat. She chopped up an apple and put it in the left over cream cheese mixture and I made a few more lattice ones.

Leaving myself enough pastry to attempt a chocolate and nutella twist….

This was by far the trickiest and I’d also read that it was the most likely to not bake properly but everything had succeeded so far so I was going to attempt it.

It was sticky and much more difficult but it went in the oven.

These did kind of look like they had exploded and they didn’t look very twisty but then I did cut it on half to help it bake so maybe it would have looked twistyer if I hadn’t.

It was more than big enough though because I barely managed to eat one.

I was fully out of energy by this point. And left my poor mum to clean up while I high tailed it out of there before I huffed at anyone.

Parents gave the fruit ones a thumbs up which are the ones I actually followed instructions for so that makes sense. I didn’t like the lemon curd ones, I don’t think pastry worked so well with it so lemon curd is strictly for cake now. I think the chocolate ones needed some added icing sugar but otherwise those were nice too.

All in all a rather surprisingly successful hour! Who knew that things that look easy on pinterest can actually be easy sometimes?

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