The photo above is croissant dough cut in the middle showing all the layers of pastry that go towards making those divine flaky breakfast (or anytime) specialties of France.
The time and patience required to go through the process of making puff pastry or croissant dough is beyond most ordinary people. Even chefs despair of it and pastry chefs have great big machines that feed the pastry and butter through to make it very thin.
Like anything the experts make it look easy. When you try this at home! it takes 4-5 goes before you get a good batch. Don't like the thought of wasting that much butter.
However, I will try. Maybe I won't tell anyone about the first 4 batches.
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| diligently peeling and coring apples for a danish type dessert |
Out of the same mix comes pain au raisin for which we needed some creme patissiere, the most beautiful custard that is used for many desserts, along with some raisins that have been soaked in alcohol, the whole product being glazed with apricot jam after baking.
This is best made using vanilla beans as the flavour is not to be compared with vanilla extract.
Cooling,
Slicing the dough ready to receive them, after they have been mixed with a little pastry cream and some raisins
shaping them onto the centre of the prepared pastry
and finally folding and wrapping the pastry to look as though it is braided.
Luckily for us we had an expert braider from way back and the end result was so good that even our instructor was impressed!
It tasted pretty darn good as well
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| being glazed after cooking |
I'm expected to cook these when I get home right?????
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| bags of goodies packed to take home with us |
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| ceiling decoration of wooden spoons which comes down every so often to be washed. |
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| enjoying the fruits of our labours |
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| Pino Ficaro - our instructor |
It was great fun and thanks to Pino for being such a patient and thorough teacher. I look forward to next weeks Macaron class
See you,
Jo
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