Danish Pastries

On Tuesday evening, we had a pta meeting at our house. As I knew it was one of the committee's birthdays, I decided to have a go at making these. Also, my day was fairly free, and I thought these would be time consuming to make - I was right!!
When I made the eccles cakes a few weeks back, I had felt bad that I had not made the pastry myself, so this was my opportunity to redeem myself, and show my new found skill as a baker- lol!
My first, and biggest mistake was to make sure my butter was "softened", as the recipe suggests. Now, I am often guilty of forgetting to get the butter out of the fridge before baking, but not this time. My butter had plenty of time. It turned out to be too much time. This is the kind of pastry that you make, roll out, and then dot lots of butter over, before folding over and rolling again, and repeating with more butter. The problem with the softened butter was that it oozed out of the sides, all over the work surface and the rolling pin, making rather a mess, and rather spoiling the whole process. Having seen them make this pastry on the Bake off, I knew the kind of thing I was aiming for. Unfortunately mine did not look the part. However, with plenty of extra flour to keep it from sticking, I eventually managed to make some pastries.I used the apple filling, - yes, I still have some cooking apples left - and the almond filling. They were both nice, but next time I would make all apple ones, as they were most popular.
Amazingly the pastries turned out ok, and there was no problem eating them on the day they were baked!
One thing I would have to say is that having made them I realise why danish pastries are no good if you are trying to keep your cholesterol down! In 16 pastries there was 350g of butter!!!! It almost put me off eating - well almost! We gave them 8.5. They were not as good as shop bought ones, but worked out a lot cheaper!