Making croissants

Guess what we did this weekend? I'll give you a hint: ooh la la! We is cooking French-style!

M has been indulging in the preparation of croissants, from the ground up. Inspired by some Food Safari, and VideoJug's How To Make Croissants, M was charged for some French cuisine. We're even tossing around an exciting word that begins with S and rhymes with 'oof-lay'.

So, croissants: they begin life as flour and lots of yeast, and other assorted things. After the dough has risen, that's where the butter comes into things. It's like the dough does all the work, and then the butter sashays along with its awesome taste and softness to make things magical.

One of the special things is that you take a huge lot of butter and roll it out between two layers of Glad Wrap and make it into a huge butter-rectangle. Then you lay it in the middle of the flat dough and fold it around the butter like a loving parcel. And roll it out nice and flat again, and wrap up and pop in the fridge for half an hour. Then you take it out, fold it up into thirds and roll it out flat again. You do this a few times, in order to get heaps of thin layers of pastry and butter. The first time, when you wrap the pastry around the butter-tangle, you've got a layer of pastry, then a layer of butter, then a layer of pastry. After you let it rest in the fridge, you take it out and turn it around ninety degrees, then fold it up into thirds again. Then you've got, what, nine layers? Pastry, butter, pastry, pastry, butter...well, you get the drift. And then you do all that again, and you end up with heaps of thin layers of butter and pastry. Yummo. Then let it rest in the fridge overnight.

Then, all things going as planned, you roll it out very very very flat and cut out triangles of pastry, which get rolled up into croissants and left to rise for a while. And then. And then. And then baked into rosy, flaky, moist delicious pastries.

So, this morning, M arose at approximately 7am, which is quite early for a Sunday, and prepared these babies:

Those are the soon-to-be-croissants, having a little rise before they get baked. They're puffing up beautifully, getting plump and tasty. And then it's straight into a hot oven and baked for breakfast.








You know when they're ready.












This is our Sunday morning breakfast table, as prepared by M.

There are not words for how flaky, soft, buttery and perfect freshly-made croissants are. I'm reluctant to compare them to the ones we had in Paris, but believe me, these would be worth a 25-hour flight to enjoy. They were perfect heaven.

I have way more photos of these babies. Close ups, glistening with butter and heat, ready to be munched on; ready to be split and filled with jam or cheese. Oh, my,yes.


In fact, I'm going to show you these photos, and you're going to be so jealous:




Fresh and hot.







With fillings on standby.






Sunday breakfast. Oh yes.