cheese and olive appys

It probably isn't a well kept secret that one of my favorite food groups is cheese. And olives aren't too far behind on my favorites list. So, as usual, when cooking a big meal, I started to worry about people being hungry prior to sitting down at the table for the main event feast on Christmas Day. I mean, it had been a whole couple of hours since breakfast. So in between prepping and cooking, I got out some puff pastry and made cream cheese and black olive pinwheels. I rolled out one square of puff pastry and cut it half so the pinwheels would be petite sized. I spread the pastry with a layer of cream cheese and then tossed some black olives, a teaspoon of capers and a dash of lemon juice and whizzed into a rough tapenade with a splash of olive oil. I spread the olive paste on top of the cream cheese and then rolled up the pastry into logs and sliced them into pinwheels and baked at 400 deg for 10 minutes. These were pronounced delicious.

Yesterday, feeling a bit more inclined to venture back in the kitchen I found another block of puff pastry and whipped up another version of pinwheels with cheese and olives - this one was inspired by an old canape recipe called "cheese olives". Basically it is baked cheese wrapped olives. I couldn't face rolling olives in a cheese mixture so I did these pinwheels instead with the same cheese that has been sitting in my fridge waiting to become cheese olives - McLaren's Imperial Cheese. I added a tsp of cream cheese and a few tablespoons of imperial cheese to a bowl and softened it in the microwave to blend it. This I spread on my puff pastry rectangle. Then I whizzed green olives in the processor until they were roughly chopped and spread those over the cheese. Rolled up into a log, sliced and baked at 400 deg F for 13 minutes til golden and melty. These smelled like cheese olives when baking, and tasted a bit like them. They were good. D pretty much inhaled the plateful.