Orange Almond Pithivier

Pithivier is a round enclosed pie comprising of two pieces of circular-shaped puff pastry with filling stuffed in between.
If you are planning on making this, my advice is that it's more convenient to use store-bought puff pastry. Home-made puff pastry requires a cool environment(air-conditioned kitchen) to facilitate easy rolling out of the dough with butter in between the layers.
I had a really tough time rolling the dough as I had to choose a hot sunny day to do it! A battle between melting butter ooozing out of the dough and throwing it back into the fridge numerous time and sustaining aching arms and shoulders told me that it would be the last time I would ever make my own puff pastry!


Ingredients:

500g puff pastry (I used home-made)

Filling:

100g butter
80g caster sugar

Zest from 2 medium-sized oranges
1 tablespoon orange juice
150g ground almonds

2 eggs
50g plain flour

1 egg for glazing

1. Beat butter and sugar till light and fluffy.

2. Add zest, juice and ground almond. Mix well.

3. Add in lightly beaten eggs and finally flour.

4. Roll out half of pastry on lightly-floured table to ½ cm thick and use a plate of 20-cm in diameter to cut out a disc. Do the same for the other half of the pastry.

5. Place one pastry disc on a baking tray(save the hassle of moving the completed pie to a tray) and spread the filling, leaving a border of 2 cm from the edge.

6. Egg wash the edge and carefully place the other piece of pastry over it and press the edges together and use a fork to seal all round.

7. Egg wash the top of pastry and with the tip of a knife, mark curved lines from the centre to the edge to make a pattern.

8. Bake in preheated oven 180deg C for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Dust with icing sugar.