Ree Drummond's Puff Pastry Braid | The Pioneer Woman | Food Network

All right everyone, you ready to eat some sweet treats today? Well, I love desserts. I didn't even wait for you to answer. I knew it was an implied yes, but we are going to make four quick and easy sweet desserts and they're all going to be simple, which I think all desserts should be simple because then you can get them in your mouth sooner. I'm going to start with a puff pastry braid. Truly one of the easiest desserts with the best result. If you pull this out of the oven and you have guests over, they won't believe how easy it is to make. Okay, puff pastry. Buy it, it's frozen, thaw it in the fridge overnight, and this is what a sheet of puff pastry looks like. It comes folded like this and so when you unfold it, it's perfect for this dessert because you work in sort of three sections. So for this puff pastry braid, I am using chocolate hazelnut spread and I'm going to just pile it onto the center of the puff pastry and I want to leave a little bit of a rim on the top and the bottom. All right, I spread out the chocolate hazelnut spread and I've got a little rim on either end, so I'm going to actually slice on both sides. Now I'll make about five or six slices. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then you want to do the exact same slices on the other side. I'm not left-handed, I'm not ambidextrous. Oh gosh. I can't do anything with my left hand. No, because then I'll then I'll be backward. Yeah. Boy, left-handed things are hard. So sad. It is really sad. I cannot do anything with my left hand. There, I did it. So before I make it into a braid, I'm going to sprinkle the chocolate hazelnut spread with chopped peanuts. You can do chopped almonds, chopped pecans. You can do chocolate chips. You don't have to do nuts. You can do like chopped toffee, which would bake into sort of a chewy amazingness. All right, so that's a nice little crunchy topping. So first things first, Alex, if you want to watch this, I'm going to come in and fold the top and then fold the bottom and then it's time to braid. So if you've ever braided your hair or your daughter's hair, you'll know how to do this, but you just cross one side over and then the other and you just make your way down, turning it into a cute little braid. And you don't want to pull too tight, but you do want to kind of snugly pull the strips across. All righty, and then when you get to the very last two strips, it's sort of an end situation, so you want to go backward and do the other side again before you fold over the final piece. But how cute is that? So oops, so make sure the ends are tucked and then I just have a beaten egg in a dish and I'm just going to brush it with beaten egg and this will help the puff pastry bake with a really pretty glossy texture, a little glossy surface. I think puff pastry is truly a dream. Alex, Mauricio, you need to stock your freezer with a couple of boxes of puff pastry because you can do savory appetizers like little triangles with filling, you can do desserts like this, you can do puff pastry pizzas, you can use it for so many things. Okay, last thing, a little sprinkle of sea salt because then you'll get that salty, sweet, chocolatey, hazelnutty combination. And then let's go put this in the oven. Let's do it. This needs to bake at 375 for about 30 minutes. It's going to puff and turn golden and that filling is going to get nice and soft and gooey. See you then. Okay, all right, check it out, Alex. Look at this beautiful puff pastry braid. Wow, it turned out so pretty. It's gorgeous. It's out of the oven, it's been cooling, so I'm going to make a pretty glaze to go over the top. You can just cut it and serve it and it's delicious, but I'm going to do some powdered sugar with a tiny splash of vanilla and a tiny splash of milk and then I'll give it a whisk and kind of check out the consistency. But I also wanted to mention this puff pastry braid approach. You can use fruit, you can do like strawberries, stirred with a little bit of sugar, a little bit of cornstarch to thicken it up, or you can take a shortcut and use canned pie filling, like cherry pie filling, apple pie filling, so many combinations. All right, so because of the vanilla, this is not like a bright white glaze situation, but it's gonna give this just a little bit of finish. A little back and forth. You can also flavor the glaze. You can do like dehydrated raspberries and make it sort of bright pink. So many possibilities, but to me it doesn't get any more quick and easy than a puff pastry braid. Okay, I think we should try it. What do you guys think? Yes. Yes, ma'am. Okay, who wants to try it? I think Stu does. I'll try it. It looks like a chocolate croissant. How is it? Whoa. Whoa. If Mauricio wants to try it, come on. Yes. Cheers. Oh, that's good. Yummy. Now I need a latte. There has never been a quicker or easier dessert than the one I am about to show you. Three words, cake mix bars. You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen. You can change up the kind of cake mix, change up the kind of candy. You can make it all yours, change the colors, whatever you want to do. So I'm kind of keeping it simple and I'm using just a white cake mix and then I'll add three tablespoons of milk. One, two, three. I'm living dangerously and just eyeballing my measurements there. Two eggs and then some luscious melted butter. That's very hot, by the way. So I better start whisking and then I'll just whisk all this together. I think it was the 90s when cookbooks started coming out showing people that they could use boxed cake mixes to kind of make their own doctored up cakes. It's such a brilliant concept because you don't have to measure all the dry ingredients. It's just ready to go. And then everything went back to we have to make everything from scratch. But now, thank goodness, cake mixes are back and they are happening. They are the popular kids and you guys are gonna agree with me when I pull these out of the oven. They're so good. Okay, so I got the basic cake mix done. I'm gonna add a bit of salt because this is a very sweet creation and the salt really helps just kind of counteract all the sweetness. Okay and now it's time to add the candy. So I've got some cute little candy morsels. They're basically like vanilla baking morsels but look at the color. Pink and blue and then some regular rainbow sprinkles and some mini candy coated chocolate pieces. I just love saying that. And then I'll stir this together and look at this cute mix, Alex. I'd like to put this on an ice cream sundae. So cute. So then what you want to do is dump it in. Oh my god. I've always wanted to do that. So aggressive. But look at this Alex. Why did you put so many? What do you mean? Oh I forgot. You're not supposed to dump the whole thing in there. Sorry. Hold on. Darn it. I got overzealous. Shoot. I got overzealous. God, I hate it when I show off and it messes things up. I've been doing that my whole life. Okay, so I have a greased cake pan and I'm gonna spread this mixture into the pan. Pretend I did not dump the whole bowl in. I was supposed to dump two thirds of it in. So then with the rest of the mixture, you just want to sprinkle it over the top. But there are so many possibilities here. You can do nuts. You can do pretzels. You can do potato chips. You can sort of do a sweet salty thing. A majig thing. All right, so let's go bake this, Alex. Ready? Okay. Gonna bake these at 350 degrees for 25 to 28 minutes until they're golden brown. Much like these. Oh wow. These you'll see were properly assembled with a third of the mixture on top. That batch is gonna look crazy because I don't know what was going on. So I'm gonna use a bench scraper to just make these into neat little squares. Okay, so get a beautiful cake stand to make these seem kind of elevated and elegant and wonderful. The first one's always the hardest. Ha. All right, I'm gonna get all of these onto the cake stand. Cake mix bars. Wow. I think it finally all paid off. Aren't they darling? They're so cute. They legitimately look like blondies. Oh, they smell amazing.