My not-so-secret family recipe

In my opinion, one of the biggest perks of working at ACP Magazines is being in the same building as the Australian Women’s Weekly Test Kitchen. I know I have gushed about AWW cookbooks before, but I really was brought up on a diet of recipes cooked from their hallowed pages. In fact, my Nan is famous in our family for her sausage rolls and it turns out her secret recipe is from a very old AWW cookbook.

Last week, ACP employees were fortunate enough to be invited to visit the Test Kitchen and sample their wares. They fed us sausage rolls and their famous triple chocolate brownies. Ask anyone who works at ACP about these brownies and they will groan wistfully and sigh, with a far off look in their eye – these brownies are legendary! But I have successfully tackled the brownies before, and now it was all about the sausage rolls.

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward, but the construction was a bit more fiddly than I expected. The recipe says you should use disposable gloves to mix the mixture, but if you, like me, don’t keep a pair handy at home, then whack a freezer bag on the hand and secure it with a hair elastic. Rudimentary, but it does the trick. The hardest part was piping the mixture onto the pastry. The easiest part was eating them when they came out of the oven.

The recipe is part of the new Australian Women’s Weekly Cooking School cookbook. I had a flick through the book and was massively impressed. I won’t be buying it because I am on a self imposed cookbook buying ban (I own over 50 cookbooks already), but it’s the kind of thing I would buy as a Mother’s Day, housewarming, engagement or wedding gift. In fact, I have a housewarming coming up that this will be perfect for! Well done, me. Tick another errand off the to-do list.

Price: $75
From: Bookstores and some newsagents
Why you need it: Everything you could ever need to know about cooking in one place

As a bonus, I’m going to give you guys the sausage roll recipe. Let me know if you try it!

500g sausage mince
500g beef mince
1 medium brown onion, chopped finely
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons bbq sauce
½ cup stale breadcrumbs
1 egg
6 sheets puff pastry
1 egg, extra

1 Preheat oven 200ºC fan-forced. Coat two oven trays with cooking oil spray, cover with baking paper.
2 Use disposable gloves for mixing with your hands (or a bag on your hand, if you want to get all primitive like me). Combine minces, onion, parsley, paste, sauce, breadcrumbs and egg in large bowl; season with salt and pepper. Spoon mixture into large piping bag, make a mess all over the bench. Curse your clumsiness.
3 Cut each sheet of pastry in half. Pipe meat along one long edge, brush pastry with extra egg, roll firmly, enclosing each long sausage.
4 Cut each roll into six bite-sized rolls, place on trays about 2cm apart. Brush rolls with extra egg, stab a hole in each roll with a sharp pointed knife. Congratulate self.
5 Bake rolls for about 30 minutes, turn and/or rotate trays after 15 minutes for even browning. Stand rolls 10 minutes before serving with tomato sauce. Congratulate self again.

This recipe makes 4 baking trays of sausage rolls. You can always freeze half of them at the end of step 3, before you chop them into bite sized pieces.

Picture credit: randomhouse.com.au