Is there any use for cooked pastry offcuts?
Chances are we’re talking about trimmings from a blind baked tart case, so the first port of call is to stay on theme. “If you’re already baking a tart, add more texture by sprinkling those lovely, crunchy pastry offcuts over the top,” says Ruby Bhogal, author of One Bake Two Ways. Otherwise, break them down (you still want “a nice chunk”, Bhogal says), brush with melted butter, sprinkle with demerara sugar, and return to the oven to crisp up further. “That’s a really nice snack with a cup of tea,” she says, adding that you could also deploy them in trifles or to top cakes.
Offcuts also play well with chocolate, so in theory you could do “a fridge-cake situation”, suggests Nicola Lamb, pastry chef and author of Sift (although you might need to save offcuts in the freezer until you have sufficient quantities). That said, Lamb and Verena Lochmuller, development chef at the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, both agree that the more sensible path would be to blitz those pastry bits into a cheesecake base. “You could also put the blitzed pastry anywhere you would a crumble, such as the bottom of a posset pot,” Lamb adds.
