Here is another entry for Action for Children’s Festive Food for a Fiver contest – my very easy sausage, cranberry and apple plait. Costing around £5.70 to make and feeding a family of six, this tasty dish works out at only 95p a head; even less if you were to make your own pastry from scratch.
The charity Action for Children is asking people to support their emergency appeal: No child should wish for food this Christmas.
As more families are finding it increasingly difficult to put regular meals on the table, they’d like people to put their creativity to work for a good cause and learn new cooking and money management skills from others, by sharing frugal recipes ideas (less than £1.25 a head) on Facebook and Twitter. The two best recipes will be rewarded with a lovely family cookbook, full of many useful tips, kindly provided by Giraffe Restaurant.
Visit the Action for Children website for more details on how you can get involved.
Sausage, cranberry and apple plait
Filled with sausage meat, this plait is essentially a big, posh sausage roll but much yummier. The cranberries and apple provide those lovely festive flavours. You can also do a sweet version by switching the sausage for marzipan or maybe mincemeat.
4 apples, peeled, cored and chopped
knob of butter
50g dried cranberries
320g ready rolled puff pastry
6 pork sausages
1 egg, beaten
Preheat the oven to 190°C / gas mark 5.
Put the apples in a saucepan with the knob of butter and cook gently until they begin to soften. Stir in the cranberries and cook for a few minutes. Then leave to cool.
Line a baking tray with baking parchment and lay the puff pastry on top.
Slice open the sausage skins and squeeze out the sausage meat down the centre of the puff pastry. Top with the cooled apple and cranberry mixture. With a sharp knife, cut stripes almost from the filling out to the edge.
Brush some beaten egg onto the pastry and then carefully fold in alternate sides of the pastry to overlap on top of the filling.
Keep going until the filling is covered. Fold over the pastry at the top and the bottom. You may need to trim of some excess pastry if it looks a little too bulky.
Brush the pastry with more egg. Bake in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is cooked through.
Carefully slice the sausage plait and serve with a simple salad. Delicious!
Bangers & Mash 
This looks yummy and how fun! I love the idea of a savory dish rather than sweet.
Thanks Karista. Yes – it is great fun to make too!
Another great recipe – I love the idea of adding cranberries and apples. We make veggie sausage rolls – next time I’m going to make a plait with the mixture and pinch your recipe idea!
Oh yes, that sounds like a great idea Sarah. And the plait is so easy to do. It’s great for giving it a slightly different look from the usual roll…
Oh I shall be making this too! And I’ve finally sourced some dried cranberries in dried-fruitless France. How delicious.
Well done you – I didn’t realise the French weren’t partial to a bit of dried fruit? You could use fresh cranberries but I guess you’d need to cook them down a little longer and be sure not to transfer to much of the juices to the pastry.
They really don’t appear to be big on dried fruit other than sultanas and prunes. Actually sourced some at Lidl in the end!.
Good old Lidl!
Hi, this looks absolutely scrumptious! I’ll have to try this soon!
Thanks Kendall. If you do, I’d love to hear what you think of it!