Sort-of-Eccles Cakes

Growing up just outside Wigan,  currant-crammed Eccles cakes were a pretty standard treat - every bakers shop made them and my gran used to toast them and serve them with butter, as if they were a teacake. I don't know whether that was the official way to eat them or not, but with a few scraps of puff pastry and half a beaten egg left from making a turkey and leek pie at the weekend, I decided to try to make some for my husband to pop in his packed lunches this week.

As well as the left over pastry and egg, this uses currants, brown sugar and mixed spice, all of which you may well have left over from your Christmas baking.

I had enough puff pastry trimmings to roll out to two thin squares, 15cm x 15cm each. For this amount of pastry, I also needed

half a beaten egg
2 tsp caster sugar
25g butter, softened
25g soft brown sugar
2 rounded tablespoons of currants (the dried kind, not fresh berries!)
¼ teaspoon mixed spice

Preheat oven to 200C, 180 fan, 400F, gas mark 6

Roll out the pastry thinly and cut into 15cm squares.

To make the filling: cream the butter and sugar together, blend in the spice and stir in the currants.

Divide the filling between the squares. Brush the edges with a little of the egg and gather them up, folding and scrunching to form a roughly round, flat parcel. Use your hands at first, then a rolling pin, to coax each parcel out into a thin circle about 10cm in diameter. The currants WILL poke through, don't worry about that!

Brush with the remaining beaten egg, sprinkle with caster sugar and score a few very shallow lines on the surface, then place on a greased, lined baking sheet.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 15-20 minutes until brown and shiny. Cool before eating.

I'm heading back to Madhouse Family Reviews and linking up to Kitchen Clearout again. (In fact, I must let you in on a little secret, after the cookathon and eatathon of the last few days, we accidentally ran out of food and I had to make a unscheduled trip to the supermarket. My post-Christmas clearout had been a little TOO thorough!)