Sugar Comatose

The last couple of days we have been working with Croissant and Danish Dough. It's a pretty labour es procedure to actually produce the dough; repetitive folds and chillings to achieve proper lamination (layering dough & butter) but after all that labour comes the fun part; shaping the dough. A top is the classic croissants. To achieve the crescent shape on the right simply add an excessive pull when first rolling your shape and a simple twist of the ends after your rolls are complete.


Then came the palmiers. Its simply croissant dough cut into a long rectangle and rolled in sugar. Taking the lengths ends and rolling them into one another. Then freezing the allow the dough to chill for easy cutting like a Pillsbury cookie log. The darker ones have additional sugar and added cinnamon. Though they tasted better, they didn't hold their shape well while baking.

Then came the danish pastries, similar to croissants but more fillings and different shapes and ICING. We mixed up five different batches of filling, a cream cheese with raisins, apricot puree, walnut filling, blueberry mixture and a poppy seed spread. And probably made ten different shapes of pastries. My favorite by far was the bear claw maybe because it made me nostalgic thinking about growing up in Ottawa and after a long skate stopping to get pastry when it was pretty evident the skating was only an excuse for the bear claw. But a close runner up was the diamond shaped pastry with a dark chocolate stick wrapped with mint hiding under the dough.