Bread Baking Babes - Croissants

Another exciting month with my Babes brings another exciting bread challenge. This month we're tackling Croissants, as chosen by the kitchen of the month Thyme for Cooking and Katie.

This is yet another recipe I'd never thought to try. I've heard how difficult and time consuming those little buggers can be. But Katie found us a recipe that didn't require a physics degree and 5 days off work.

Now most months I am lucky enough that Mary and I meet online and tackle our baking assignment together. This time before we baked there was much discussion on our supersecretbbb blog about flour types and moisture content and all sorts of topics that just went right over my head. Mary made a couple of adjustments to the recipe that she felt might give us a bit more success, while I sat silently in the corner until it was time to bake together. We/she decided that we'd make the croissants over 2 days - make the dough on the Saturday night and finish the croissants Sunday morning.

To see the recipes, visit Katie and Mary.

So Saturday night we made our dough, let it have its first rise, and then put it in the fridge over night. We then got our butter/flour mixture blended, shaped and wrapped in the fridge, then called it a night.

Early the next morning we met again online. We rolled out the dough into a rectangle and placed the butter/flour block in the middle.

The dough is folded over the butter and is turned, rolled and chilled 3 times. Every time you turn, roll and fold the dough you are creating the layers in the dough. This, my friends, is what makes the croissant flaky.

After all the rolling and folding and turning and chilling was done, I rolled out the dough one last time...

And trimmed the edges and cut it in half. Half was for croissants, and half was for a pesto baguette.


We made a cardboard template and used it to cut the dough into croissant shapes.


We made 4 kinds - plain, salmon, ham and cheese and chocolate.



With the other half of the dough we made a Croissant Baguette with Pesto.



From start to finish Sunday, I think it took me about 5 hours. But we ended up with some fabulous looking foods. The pesto baguette was incredible.


The croissants were....good. They took ages and ages to brown, and they didn't get very big. It's strange that half the dough could make a fantastic baguette and the other half made okay croissants. But they were pretty nice a couple of days later when we warmed them up and dunked 'em in our soup.


I'm wondering if I did something wrong - did I work the dough too much, did I do something incorrectly with my turns and rolls? Should they have risen longer? Hmmmmm.

Thanks to Katie for January's challenge. Next month will be extra cool for the Babes - we've got 2 new members! Stay tuned for all the details.