Apple Pouches

These bite-sized treats (which I decided to call pouches) are made of a combination of fertility symbols and traditional Beltane foods - apples, cottage cheese, almonds, dried cranberries and honey. It is slightly tricky to make them, but the final product is aesthetically impressive and finger-lickingly good!

You Will Need:

• 1 pack of integral strudel dough (400 g, you get it in the form of thin sheets, I had 9 sheets in the package)
• 3 tart apples (e.g. Idared)
• 500 g cottage cheese
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 packet vanilla sugar
• cinnamon (to taste)
• ca. 50 g butter (for daubing the dough)
• handful dried cranberries
• 2 handfuls almonds
• thin rope for tying the pouches

How To Prepare:

1. Heat up the oven to 200°C.
2. Peal and grate the apples.
3. Press out the excess liquid from the apples by putting them in a strainer/colander and pressing on them with a spoon until most of the liquid is gone.
4. Put the almonds in a baking pan and bake for 5 minutes. Chop them up into smaller pieces/beat them with a meat cleaver (if you decide to do the latter, then wrap them up in cling film beforehand). Add the almonds to the apples.
5. Mix the apples, almonds, cottage cheese, vanilla sugar, honey, cinnamon and cranberries.
6. Cut up each piece of the strudel dough into 6 approximately same-sized rectangles. So a package containing 9 strudel sheets (which is the usual amount) should yield about 54 rectangles (that is to say, you should finally be left with 27 pouches from this number of rectangles).
7. Melt the butter.
8. Make the pouches from the strudel sheets as follows:
1. Place one rectangle on your working area and daub with butter.
2. Place a second rectangle diagonally over the first one (you should now have 2 crossed rectangles).
3. Daub the the middle of the second rectangle with butter.
9. Place one teaspoon of the apple-cheese filling in the middle of the rectangles.
10. Gather the edges of the pastry sheets above the filling and tie off with a piece of rope.
11. Repeat steps 8-10 until you run out of strudel sheets.
12. Place baking paper on your baking pan and transfer the apple pouches onto it.
13. Bake for approximately 10-15 minutes at 200°C.

Notes: When gathering the sheets above the filling, try to do this in one go. The more you fiddle with the strudel sheets, the likelier it is that they will break. Basically, they are very fragile so keep this in mind when handling them throughout the entire baking process. This is what makes this recipe tricky.