Croissants

I only just got these made in time for the April Bake off for ‘Fresh From The Oven’. This month it was chosen by Corrie from Hot Potato Blog.

I was glad it was another recipe from the River Cottage Bread Handbook as I like their recipes and find the book easy to follow, albeit difficult to prop open as it is so small. I end up sticking a jar of jam on each page.

I decided to make only half quantities as I’m sure, with only 3 of us here, a recipe that used 2 whole packs of butter is probably illegal.

Here is the one pack of butter that gets folded into the enriched dough.

Well in my book that’s almost a health food.

The dough is refrigerated overnight and then a series of folds and twists are performed, similar to making puff pastry. Then you make a 25 x 20cm isosceles triangle croissant template.

Yes really.

For future reference you can just squeak the template out of a standard size Weetabix box as they are 20 x 25cm.

Who knew?

Rolling out the pastry is not an easy task. It keeps trying to revert to being small again, but eventually I was down to the fun bit of rolling them up.

Then look how cute they look.

I almost forgave them for being such hard work!

Like little bready crab things.

You are left with a pile of rolled out dough which I wodged together into some kind of impromptu after school pain au chocolat style snacks.

I left them 4 hours to rise and they still never puffed up to the promised ‘double the size’. But we put them in the oven anyway. They rose quite well in there.

I have to say I have not tried a whole croissant yet (I only just managed to bake them before sunset ready for the posting deadline) but my ‘leftover bits turned into pain au chocolates’ were lovely. They are very flaky and have a slightly sweet and very buttery taste.

I think this may be one that is left to the experts on all but very special occasions but I am glad that I finally managed to bake these.

We plan to have the 4 croissants I baked tonight for our breakfast then I have frozen 6 for an indulgent Weekend breakfast to come.

Update – 4 croissants eaten for breakfast. Mission Accomplished!