I love how Facebook lets me be a fly on the wall in the lives of our family members, scattered across the globe, especially when pieces of family history come out. Tonight Orville’s daughter Janet Ann shared an old family recipe for banket, a gorgeous flakey, buttery Dutch pastry with sweet almond filling.
Here is the recipe as shared by Janet Ann following this Facebook exchange. (I still call her Janet Annabel because that’s what Grandma always said, to differentiate between the two Janets!)
As I am now updating this post 12 years later — originally posted December 2010 and it is now it’s January 2023 — I just made banket for the first time. I don’t know how it took me this long! I have a couple notes to add:
- If you don’t have almond paste in the house, which I didn’t, it’s really easy to make. Here’s the recipe I used. It also includes instructions on how to blanche almonds if you don’t have blanched almonds in the house, since I didn’t! That part is a little tedious but not difficult.
- When making the dough for the crust, unless you have a really huge food processor, you might have to do it in two lots.
- Make the dough just like you would make pie crust– use chilled butter and cut it into chunks and process with the flour until you get a crumbly mixture. You don’t want to melt the butter or mix it too thoroughly with the flour. Those little bits of butter are what will make the pastry flakey.
- After you mix the flour and butter, put it in a big bowl and that’s when you add your milk/water. Make sure everything stays cold.
- Mix it with a wooden spoon a bit to spread it around but then get your hands into it and press it together. You may need to add a little more (or less) liquid than the recipe calls for. You’re trying to get it just wet enough that it will come together, but you don’t want it to be sticky.
- Once you have a nice ball of dough, cover the bowl with a plate and stick it in the fridge for a while to let the ingredients to absorb into one another a bit.