Blackberry Cream Cheese Pastry

I made these up too. I used the Pate Choux recipe from Martha’s book, and was not impressed. I have a better and easier recipe of my own that I would have used, but it was online, and alas, no internet at home. I got the idea for these when I worked at Macey’s in Logan. They had these cream cheese raspberry Danishes that were amazing. Every morning that I worked at 6 am I would get one. They called them Danishes, but the dough was more like a cream puff dough than a Danish dough. So that’s what I used for mine, a cream puff “dough.” I put dough in quotes because really it’s not like a dough at all. It’s flour, butter, water and eggs, but it calls for so many eggs that It’s more of a creamy mixture than a hard dough. You actually put it into a frosting bag and pipe it onto a cookie sheet. I piped out little disks and then froze them for 15 minutes, before taking them out and adding a rim to the edge of the disks and then put them back in the freezer for 15 minutes.

For the cream cheese mixture, I used Neufchatel cheese, which is basically low-fat cream cheese, but I can’t taste the difference and it happened to be what was in my fridge. Plus, it’s softer than cream cheese and I thought that would be nice for the pastries. I warmed it just a bit and added a couple tablespoons of milk and sprinkled some sugar. Just to add a tiny bit of sweetness, but I knew that the blackberries would be sweet, so it would even out the tang of the cream cheese. I used blackberries instead of raspberries because I have a bunch in my freezer. I let them thaw and then mashed them with a spoon and sprinkled probably…. 3 tablespoons of sugar to a cup, cup and a half of blackberries.

I pulled out the frozen pastry disks and put a dot of cream cheese and a spoonful of blackberries. I only did this on half, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted them to be baked with the filling or have the pastry be baked and then add the filling after. So after baking them, I filled the other half. I decided I liked the ones with the non-baked filling. They are fresher tasting, but because you put it on while they are warm, the cream cheese still melts a little. They were quite delicious. J I think I would bake the pastries a little longer next time though until they are brown and somewhat crispy. They were much too soft for my taste. All in all I thought it was a fairly good recipe to be made up, and had very little sugar.