And pastry was born.

Puff pastry, and croissants, and well, danish.  Which are shockingly not nearly as hard to make as one would think.

And now you’re like-

NOPE.  You ❤ cooking.

I reject your premise.

I can see your point of view.  Allow me to offer my own.

You’re Wrong.

You’re wronger than electric pink legwarmers with glitter eyeliner and crimped side-ponytails.

This girl doesn’t bake.  Cooking no = baking.

I feel like a 4-yr-old trying to write the alphabet with those big stupid crayons in a baking kitchen.  To top it off, I don’t even like pastries, so in not eating them I’m not familiar with how they’re supposed to turn out.

Hehheh, it’s a touch enthralling having no fucking clue what you’re doing 😉

So with that perspective, when I say these doughs are easier than they look I mean, well..  just that.

We all know that croissants and danish are layers of dough-butter-dough-butter-dough-butter, etc, which gives them that layered flakiness.

And obviously, these layers are accomplished by folding the dough over several times, rolling it out, folding it again, etc.  Logic gets us to that point, oui?

But how do you get the damn butter into the dough in the first place?  All mimbly-bimbly like we like?

The answer:  Your dough eats it like an Alien pod.  BBRRRAAWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAA.

Put your panties on, we’ll get to Alien domination in a second.

First, the DL is necessary:  Two not only highly encouraged, but mandatory, key bits of info for recreating this dough…

1.  It needs to rest a shit ton, between every time you work with it, in the fridge.

2. Your dough and butter must consistently be the same temperature.

So you make your initial dough (sans el buttero) and let it rest in a ball.  Then you cut an X into it halfway down, and open it like an alien pod.  BRBBRRRRAAAAAAWWWWAAAAA!

Insert butter, and fold dough around.  Now, this is butter that’s maybe slightly softened, but we actually put it between two sheets of parchment and whacked it with the rolling pin several times to make it a little more malleable before putting in the dough packet.  THEN we whacked it again inside the dough packet to get it to spread with the dough.

<pause>  While pounding things is super tons of fun…  isn’t that a lot of effort?

Yes.  But really think about butter.  It’s all squishy when it’s room temp.  Now imagine rolling it out with a rolling pin.  It’s going to squash everywhere, unevenly and stickily.  And while there are times in life where sticky is desirable, this is not one of them.

It’s also wetter at room temperature, which will moisten your dough and you’ll get little splodges of butter coming through your dough.  Again, not even distribution and, not desirable.  Boo uneven distribution.

On the upside, you get to give the butter a good pounding …  And who doesn’t like that.

Exaaaactly.

Why do we care?  Because it will affect the final product.  When you have huge goo bombs of butter speckled throughout your dough, besides being hard to work with, your final product will come out much drier when the butter melts out during baking instead of staying where it needs to be, inside the dough, helping leaven it through steam.  GO IN YOUR HOME!  DON’T YOU LIKE YOUR HOME??

Now I’ve stained your best shirt with information regurgitation here, but if you take the actual process out and look at it–> you make a dough, insert butter, roll out, fold, fridge, and repeat.  Done all at once this process takes about 5 minutes.  Then cocktail time, then 15 seconds of rolling/folding about 30 minutes later, then cocktail time, repeat rolling/folding, then cocktail time…

Read:  For a grand total of oohhhh, 20 minutes of actual work, you can have fresh croissants/danish.

And a very healthy cocktail hour(s).

Now that’s a turn on.