Cooking – Date Slice/Pie

There are two components – the filling and the pastry.

Prepare the filling in advance – it needs to warm slowly.

Filling: 1 cup dates, ½ cup sugar, ½ cup water.

Simmer on a low heat, mash, simmer, mash, simmer, to produce a sluggish but fluid paste.

Pastry: ½ cup shortening, ½ cup sugar, ½ cup flour, 1 cup rolled oats.

I have learned to place the dough on one side of a sheet of parchment paper and fold the other side over, sandwiching the dough between two sides of parchment paper.

The rolling pin doesn’t get as messy this way.

Judicious use of folds can help to make a rectangular rolled sheet of pastry dough, if this is desired.

I have used half of the dough bowl to make the tray, the other half will make the lid of the pie/slice.

I inverted my glass bowl over the rolled sheet and trimmed the edges of the sheet to make an approximate fit.

I could as easily have draped the sheet over the bowl and trimmed the edge, letting the sheet sag into the bowl.

The filling is dumped into the pastry tray. The second half of the dough has been rolled to make the lid.

The two layers of pastry and the layer of filling are quite thin – perhaps not more than five millimetres each.

Watch what happens!

After baking at 375Ί for about thirty minutes, the browned pastry has expanded as has the filling.

Here is the pie turned out to cool for an hour or so, after which I will pop it in the refrigerator and nibble away at it over the next few days.