For New Year’s Eve, I wanted to make something special to share with my friends that I love so very very much. Everyone knows that the diet starts January 1st, so it also seemed important to do some carbo-loading and make something rather indulgent, so I settled on chocolate croissants, from Paul Hollywood’s book How to Bake, a cookbook that I have found to be slightly pompous, beautifully illustrated, and extremely instructive and reliable. I also like looking at the pictures of his piercing blue eyes. They stare at my loaves and pastry from the pages and let me know that my bakes are certainly not up to snuff, but that I should keep trying.
Sidenote: my boyfriend got me all set up with some sort of mysterious technology that allows me to watch netflix on our small kitchen TV over Christmas, so now I can spend an unlimited number of hours rolling out dough in the kitchen without regretting the time lost vegging out with the Great British Bake-Off. This is a game-changer for me. Get ready for truckloads of baked goods, Indianapolis.
I was also gifted with this beautiful recipe-book-holder-thing for the holidays, and I really wanted to use it. Isn’t it cute? (Please ignore the peek of the messy corner of my kitchen. We all have a place that the things we don’t know what to do with go to create perpetual clutter, and mine is right there.) The croissant recipe in the book included two pages of full-photo step-by-step instructions on the folding and shaping and whatnot, but I didn’t like turning the pages on the recipe stand so…. I didn’t look at those too much. Oh well! We’ll call that a determination to blaze my own trail rather than silliness.
This recipe is a two-day project, so make sure you have adequate time before diving in.
First I made the dough, which consisted of the usual suspects like flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and water. I shaped it into a little ball and chucked it in a ziplock bag for an hour in the fridge while doing my favorite part: bashing several beautiful sticks of butter together with a rolling pin to create one enormous slab of caloric goodness.
I promise I didn’t steal this part of the blog from Julia Child, I am genuinely afflicted with a deep and abiding obsession with creamy butter. I love butter so much. So much. I always butter individual bites of everything right before eating it so that I can have the authentic, unmelted taste of the fat in every mouthful. The amount of butter that I use per slice of bread that I eat is pretty much 1:1. If you say you don’t like butter, you’re lying or confused. I promise it is a main ingredient in something that you love to eat. Sometimes, when I am trying to cook something, taste it, and just don’t really like it, I just add a sizable chunk of butter and nine times out of ten it’ll fix it. Try it.
Ok, sorry. Back to business. I rolled out my dough into a large rectangle, and sealed the slab of butter inside, and then popped it back in the fridge for another hour. I rolled it out again, folded it using a book fold (in thirds), and chilled it again. I did this three or four times, turning the dough each time. I then got tired, realized the colts were going to win, and went to bed, leaving the dough to rest and rise overnight in the fridge, hoping to discover some layers and some rise in the morning.
I peeked in the fridge when I got up the next day, and noticed that it had risen quite a bit, which made me happy, but I laid around for a while before rolling it out one more time, cutting it into triangles, and rolling it up with chocolate in the middle. (Check out the lamination in that dough, take that Paul!)
I left it to rise for a few hours and went to see Mary Poppins Returns, which was AWESOME. Haters can hate. I loved every second of it. I laughed, I ugly cried, and I felt like a child seeing Disney World for the first time for the entirety of the movie.
After a little eggwash bath and some googling to discover how to convert Paul’s oven temperature to Fahrenheit, I popped them in the over for twenty minutes, and enjoyed the way my house filled with the delightful smell of baking butter. They came out super cute, if I do say so myself, and I think my friends liked them. I didn’t manage to come home with any, and I heard some exclamations of yasss chocolate at our New Year’s Eve bash, so everything seems to have worked out.
These were very fun and very satisfying to make, which seems like the right way to close out 2018. May you enjoy a lot good health, happiness, and a lot of butter in the New Year.
