CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS

 From the moment I saw the recipe in delicious magazine know wanted to have a go. Most of the ingredients were in the larder apart from the chocolate batons. Decided Amazon was easiest option and duly ordered. A few days later they arrived. Not a small box, read, “didn’t read contents” for this, but a whopping 1.75kilos of chocolate batons. Not sure how many but at a rough guess I’ll need to produce in region of 500 croissants to use them all up 😂

May have to sell them from the kitchen window. 

Anyway, on the day I had decided to start I assembled ingredients then read through the recipe. What I’d failed to pick up on was that this was not a fast food recipe. This was a Wednesday and following all the steps we could be tucking into them on Friday morning. I could see I was going to have to be very patient. 

First stage completed. Dough now to rest overnight in fridge. As is a flattened slab of butter. 

Next day.  Rolling out  and laminating the butter into the dough. Basically folding and rolling, turn it around and roll and fold again. Several stages of this with careful measuring, each time with a rest in the fridge between stages.     

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 Finally got to the stage of cutting and adding the chocolate batons before rolling, and yes once again into fridge for another overnight stay. 

Now my thinking is I’d get up in the morning and pop them into the oven and sit down and enjoy. 

On further inspection of the recipe realised I’d missed the last, but very important stage before I could go ahead and cook them. Proving! Another 2-21/2 hours! 

So adding on the 20 minutes cooking time I needed to get them out of the fridge by 7am given we’d have a leisurely 10am breakfast. Now 7.00am isn’t my usual time for rising but made the effort I wasn’t going to fall at the last hurdle. Set them out went back to bed and waited. Online newspaper helped pass the time. A couple of checks were reassuring. They were starting to grow and wobble as recipe said. Part of me was still wondering whether I’d wasted a lot of time, effort and ingredients over the past couple of days. 

Finally time to put them in the oven but only after an egg wash. At least this was only 20 minutes. Wouldny be too long before my efforts would be revealed. No going back now. I was happy that I was soon smelling the delicious aroma of them coming from the oven, and through the glass the seemed to be performing as they should. 

20 mintiest later, with coffee machine ready to supply the perfect accompaniment to the chocolate croissants all was revealed. Happy to say I was pretty pleased with my first attempt. 

The recipe was spot on with instructions. They had risen well had the flaky layers. There’s room for improvement mainly in the final folding of them. But I will definitely be doing them again at least until I use up all the chocolate batons. 

At last we were able to enjoy my efforts of the last couple of days. Made the effort to make the table look nice as befitted my efforts. Made for a very nice breakfast experience 

Moral of the story. Read, read and read again all the instructions. 😂😂😂