John Whaite's Spiced Lamb Pasties

Pasties are traditionally associated with Cornwall. A freshly baked pasty is a delicious pastry, typically made with meat and vegetables, like beef, swede or turnip and onion. I'm not the biggest fan of turnips.
Turnips always bring back memories of my student days. In the Soviet times most 1-year-students spent up to a month on collective farms, just before the studies started in early October, helping with the harvest. We were digging turnips intended as an animal feed, but as we spent many hours outdoors, we were all quite hungry and often munched on the raw turnips, peeling the skin off with a knife.
Recently celebrity chef John Whaite has come up with a lamb pasty recipe for Stork's Sunday Bakes service. This service is a social media service designed to help people bake on the nation's favourite baking day - Sunday.
Stork and John Whaite have created a series of videos for Bake with Stork Youtube channel, check it out for useful baking tips and inspiration.
I loved the sound of lamb pasties - scroll down my post to watch the video on how to make them.

These delicious pasties are filled with minced lamb, grated sweet potato (hurrah! no turnips in sight!), peas and cheese as well as spices. The shortcrust pastry is made with Stork rather than traditional butter.
I have slightly adapted the recipe. I added twice the amount of grated sweet potato (and have a little bit of filling left because of that, but I put it in the freezer and will have it one day for lunch as a topping for a baked potato).
I also used a Cheddar cheese rather than feta, because I bought a lovely local Cheddar on the farmers' market and wanted to use it.
And I cooked pasties with fresh peas.
My crimping technique is pants second-rate. I'm much better at crimping pirozhki (Russian mini pies), but then they are usually smaller in size, so much easier to work with.

However, the filling was absolutely delicious. I baked four biggish pasties. They might not look like celebrity chef's creations but they were tasty.
If you plan to bake them, the full list of ingredients and instructions on how to cook the pasties can be found under the video on Youtube (click on Youtube symbol to move from this post to the video).
These pasties would be a lovely addition to a picnic or even the upcoming Patron's Lunch.




Do you love pasties? What is your favourite filling?

Disclosure: I received a £20 Sainsbury's voucher to buy the products to test the recipe. All opinions are mine.