Warming the cockles

I am in mourning, and also in a rage. About pastry. Edmonds has announced it will no longer produce pastry. This is amazingly rude. I have been using its butter puff pastry forever. It has to be butter pastry. You cannot make pastry with nasty margarine.

- Michele Hewitson

Nobody, unless they are an insufferable show-off or have too much time on their hands, makes their own puff pastry.

Have you ever looked at the instructions for making it? There are recipes that assure the reader that there are "quick and easy" ways to make puff pastry. Yeah, right. And I'll just nip to my kitchen and whip up a batch of croissants in half an hour. A properly good croissant, which is the ultimate example of flaky pastry, involves a folding in of butter up to 30 times.

Here at Lush Places, we are partial to a pastry-clad thing. Now that Edmonds has discontinued its butter puff pastry, how am I to make my friend Linda's famous sausage rolls? (The trick - don't tell her I told you is the addition of grated apple or pear.) Or the bacon-and-egg pie we often have for tea? Butter puff pastry is also essential for my Eccles cakes.