Croissant dough preparation

Hi everyone!

I hope your weekend was relaxing.  :) Monday is here too soon, yet again.

Sorry this is a little late. I will skip over the small talk and get straight into the day.

We are in croissant week beautiful people!! Exciting, I know :)  This is like candy!!  We created the dough today as well as the two fillings we are going to use tomorrow to fill them;  almond cream and maple pecan filling. I hope this almond cream tastes better than the last one, as I wasn't a fan. ;)  Although, I found out today that one of my friends loved that almond cream! Nice.. there we go again, different strokes for different folks :).

This dough is very similar to the puff pastry dough except its created by incorporating the French method of preparing the dough vs the English method used with the puff pastry.  Instead of rolling your dough out in a rectangular shape you will roll it out to a square shape. 

Your first step is to create the dough in your mixer, under mixing like you did the puff pastry. While the dough ferments, grab a piece of parchment paper, put 1 lb 8 oz of soft, room temperature butter on one side of the paper and then fold the other piece over.  Roll this out until you have a small butter sphere in the middle of the parchment sheet.  Set this aside.

Roll our your dough to a square shape. Physically move the dough and turn it so you have a diamond shape in front of you. Place your butter sphere right in the middle of it and then fold up the bottom part of your diamond dough, like this:

Continue folding by bringing over the right side, pinching the dough with the previous flap so that the butter is sealed inside. Bring the left side over, pinch the dough to seal the butter in as well.  This is what you will look like at this point:  

 Bring down the top dough and you will now have created the French styled envelope :)

Roll the dough slightly at this point, to ensure the butter is sealed in.. and then fold it in thirds as we did the puff pastry dough.

You will put this in the cooler for 20 minutes or so, then refold and cool. Do this for a total of 4 times.

:) We are going to use our dough this week two out of the remaining 4 days.  We are making plain croissants tomorrow and almond filled ones as well.  On Wednesday we will fill them with ham and cheese's... all sorts of savory ingredients.  Yummy.  Too bad he didn't mention anything about chocolate!! uughh!! I mean, really? Sweet is better than savory!! :) :) But, I have been waiting to create croissants for some time and the time is now :)  

Tomorrow we will see how these turn out. I hope you enjoy your evening.  I will be back here tomorrow with a little more sass for ya.

Night night!