Strawberries & Cheese Mille-feuille

Strawberries & Cheese Mille-feuille

(recipe adapted from Sale & Pepe magazine, Serbian issue for May 2011)

Pastry

30 g flour
125 g sugar
60 g ground almonds
50 g butter, melted
3 Tbsp port

Mix port with sugar, butter and almonds. Stir in flour and transfer into the fridge for an hour. What you will have is a runny batter, not a hard dough. Do not worry, it will harden a bit in the fridge.

Line large oven pan with baking paper. Pour batter on the middle of the pan and cover with another piece of baking paper. Flatten it over the paper to the thickness of just a dew millimeters. Bake in a preheated oven on 180°C/350°F for about 10-15 minutes. It will bubble and look kind of strange, but it’s OK. Take it out from the oven as soon as you notice that the edges start to brown. When it’s out of the oven, cut it quickly into 12 equal rectangular shapes. You need to cut fast as the pastry will be impossible to cut when it starts to cool down. When cooled, pieces will be very fragile, so work carefully.

Cream

400 g cream cheese
2 Tbsp honey

Whisk honey into the cream cheese enough to be incorporated well. Leave in the fridge until you prepare the sauce.

Sauce

200 ml red wine
2 Tbsp port
45 g sugar
200 g strawberries

Boil wine with port and sugar. Continue to cook on low heat until it reduces to the half. Remove from heat, puree strawberries and add them to the reduction and let cool.

You might want to strain pureed strawberries to get the finer texture of the sauce.

Assembling

250 g strawberries
mint
cinnamon

Pipe cram cheese on each pastry with a pastry bag. Dust with a bit of powdered cinnamon. Arrange a couple of slices of strawberries on top of each and decorate with mint leaves. Pour some sauce on each serving plate and place 3 pastries with the cream on each.