Prep time: 30 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Yield: 9
Ingredients:
- 1 (8.6 oz) sheet puff pastry
- 2 oz cream cheese, softened
- 1 ½ tbsp strawberry jam
- 1 drop red food coloring (or use beet powder) optional
- ⅔ cup very small diced strawberries
- 1 large egg whisked with 1 tbsp water
- Powdered sugar, for dusting
Directions:
- Thaw puff pastry, following the instructions on the package. Halfway through thawing, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
- While puff pastry is thawing, in a small bowl using a rubber spatula, mix together cream cheese, jam and food coloring while pressing mixture along bottom and sides of bowl to smooth large lumps.
- Transfer to refrigerator until ready to use (so it’s not runny, you can flash chill in freezer if you prepared this near the end of the pastry thawing).
- Cut pastry into heart shapes using a 3-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter (space them as close together as possible so you can get as many as you can out of the sheet).
- Transfer hearts to a baking sheet lined with a silicone liner or parchment paper, spacing 1 ½ inches apart.
- Using a sharp knife, lightly score a heart coming about ⅓-inch from the edge, without cutting entirely through bottom of the dough.
- Add 1 tsp of the cream cheese mixture to center of each heart then spread outward without covering the ⅓-inch edge.
- Add strawberries over cream cheese layer, again without covering the edge. Using your fingertip brush the ⅓-inch edge with egg/water mixture.
- Bake in preheated oven 14-15 minutes until edges are golden brown. Let cool on a wire rack then dust with powdered sugar. Serve the day they are prepared.