I have two daughters, ages 3 and 5, and as with many young girls, the tea party has seized their imaginations. Nothing is more fun than hitting up the dress-up chest for frilly outfits and then sitting down to enjoy their make-believe drinks and treats. Imagine their delight to come home from preschool to find real teatime treats that the Queen herself has enjoyed!
How To Make These 4-Ingredient Jam Puffs
Despite their royal pedigree, the Queen Mother’s favorite jam puffs are very easy to make. The recipe is in Cooking & the Crown, by Tom Parker Bowles, but you hardly need a recipe to make them. First, roll out a sheet of store-bought puff pastry and use a biscuit or cookie cutter to cut out three-inch circles.
Next, put a tiny dollop of jam—about a teaspoon—in the middle of each one, then brush beaten egg around the edges. Finally, fold the pastry over into half-moon shapes, and use a fork to crimp the edges. After chilling the puffs for 15 minutes, bake them in a 350°F oven for about 20 minutes. They’re done when they’re golden brown. Serve them sprinkled with powdered sugar, with a little heavy cream on the side.
Simply Recipes / Coco Morante
Tips for Making the Queen’s Favorite Jam Puffs
No doubt the royal kitchen made their own puff pastry and preserves for these, but I don’t know anyone who makes their own puff at home. Pepperidge Farm is the most widely available brand, and it’s just fine. Trader Joe’s is much better, but it’s only available seasonally, and I have already used up the last of my reserves.
As for the preserves, I’ve been making mine for decades, since my aunties taught me as a child. The jars take up a lot of space in my pantry, so I was happy to have an excuse to crack open a couple of them the first time I tried this recipe for my girls. I went with plum butter and cherry jam.
If you use store-bought, choose something that has a thick consistency. That will make it a lot easier to work with the jam puffs. Thinner jams tend to slide around and spill out the sides as you try to fold and crimp the pastry.
This recipe calls for a pound of puff pastry to yield 12 to 16 jam puffs. I ended up with about two dozen, though! It goes a very long way when rolled out to a thickness of 1/16 inch, and you can smush together and roll out the scraps to use it all up. I used a rolling pin with measuring guards on the sides to ensure I was rolling out the dough evenly and accurately, but you don’t have to be so precise. Just get it nice and thin.
The Surprise Ingredient in the Queen’s Favorite Dessert
This recipe has a tiny surprise twist at the end. Apparently, it’s a rite of passage to successfully bite off a corner of a jam puff, pour in some cream, then consume the whole thing with delicate precision.
In the recipe’s headnote (which is delightfully full of royal affectation), the Earl of Caithness recalls trying to perform this maneuver and embarrassing himself by making a drippy mess of his hillside picnic treat.
Like the Earl, my daughters and I also failed at this, making a mess but having lots of fun in the process. I’d serve them with something thicker like whipped cream or clotted cream if I wanted to cut down on the clean-up!
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