Eek! We are now midway through our Yule calendar, and not a single recipe yet! Let's fix this issue now with a very traditional Finnish yule pastry: the "star pastry", joulutorttu. Folks in Sweden know these pastries as jultårta.
Picture from Wikipedia
The Yule pastries are actually very simple. Traditionally, they are made from puff pastry and filled with prune jam, and shaped like a pinwheel or a star. After baking, you can dust the pastries with powdered sugar.
Now, making the puff pastry is a lot of work: you need to fold the dough several times and add butter between the layers. Most folks buy frozen puff pastry from the store to skip this step. Feel free to do so! But if you have more time and love baking, just pick any puff pastry recipe you like. Then, you only need prune jam, egg, and powdered sugar.
This is how you shape the dough into stars or pinwheels: cut the rolled out dough into squares (the smaller the squares, the smaller the pastries will be). Make a cut starting from each corner, but don't cut through the centre of the square (this is where the filling will be added to). Put some prune jam into the centre. Moisten the corners slightly with egg and fold the other half of each corner onto the jam in the middle and press them slightly so that the corners are sealed together. Put the pastries on a baking sheet (on parchment paper) and brush them with egg. Bake them in the oven (225 °C) for appr. 10–15 minutes (might vary between different ovens). Dust the baked pastries with powdered sugar.
Here is a video that shows how to shape the pastries as pinwheels and some other fancy shapes. Here, the jam is put on top of the dough – you can do it either way!
Tips to fold the Yule pastries
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