Cottage Cheese Pufflets (TWD)

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie (TWD) recipe was chosen by Jacque of Daisy Lane Cakes : Cottage Cheese Pufflets. I don't normally eat cottage cheese - I've actually never even tried it. The texture just seems so weird to me that I don't want to try it. But seeing as the cottage cheese is blended into the dough in this recipe, I was willing to give it a try. So this was technically my first time trying cottage cheese :)


The dough is simple enough to make, as long as you have a food processor. Working with the dough, however, was extremely difficult for me. Despite refrigerating the dough overnight, I found that it would warm up and soften much too quickly for my liking. I had to roll it out, stick it in the freezer for a few minutes, and then that would only buy me a few minutes to make a few pufflets before I had to put it back in the freezer. This resulted in a very long and drawn out process... (I even cut my block of dough into 4 pieces instead of 2, working with less dough each time to avoid having to re-roll the dough out in several batches.)


The result? The dough was slightly flaky but a buttery soft, melt in your mouth kind of texture. It was quite delicious and well worth the struggle. I'm not sure how puffy these pufflets were supposed to get, but regardless they were delicious.

I ended up doing two different variations... with half the dough I made triangular pufflets just like Dorie instructs you to. With the other half of the dough I simple folded the edges in and left some preserves exposed. I found that using this method allowed me to get a higher preserves to pastry ratio which I prefer. (Dorie calls these cookies but I think they're more like pastries.)


I made some with orange marmalade and some with apricot preserves. After making several kinds of pastries, I've come to the conclusion that my favorite fruit filled pastry is one with apricot preserves. So if you made yours with another type of preserve, I encourage you to try this recipe with apricot preserves :)


Thanks Jacque, for picking this recipe. I loved the pufflets and they were all gone by the end of the day (I hate to admit it, but my husband only had a few and I ate the rest!) If you would like the recipe, you can find it here. Make sure you check out the TWD Blogroll, to see how everyone else enjoyed these pufflets.

* Recipes notes:
- I did not poke a hole in my pufflets to vent them and they turned out just fine.
- I would definitely recommend cutting your refrigerated dough into 4 pieces, working with just one piece and leaving the rest in the fridge while you assemble the first batch of pufflets. Make sure you put the dough back in the fridge or freezer if it gets too soft, otherwise it is impossible to work with (also results in very messy fingers!)
- I baked mine for 12-14 minutes, just slightly longer than indicated.
- For more tips, click here.