This is a quick and easy recipe for shortcrust pastry. If you're new to making pastry, you won't believe how simple it can be. You can make it by hand or in a food processor. The secret is to ...

A pinch of salt is essential for flavour. To get a really short pastry, you could swap out half the butter for lard. And to achieve a flakier pastry, you could increase the butter to about 2:3 ...

This pastry is much easier to roll out, and acts almost like the real thing. You may get a little cracking, but hardly any. You can line flans and tarts now using the normal way of rolling out pastry.