Freshly and Lovingly Baked : 18th April 2014
I did express my fear for laminated dough more than once in my life. I lamented, I whined, I poured through baking books and salivated at the perfect croissant pictures, I swear to bake one and then I chickened out on baking day.
To me, the ability to make a good croissant is imperative as a baker. It is a taste of a baker’s skill. The reason why I am so scare of it is due to the current fact that I never really have luck with laminated dough. I tried with puff pastry, chinese style pastry and all. The perfect layering which I so crave for never seem to materialize.
I swear that the day when I decided to take the plunge and embark on this project of Hot Cross croissant, I had dreams about rolling out the dough. I dreamt about croissant! OMG!
With Easter round the corner and I figured that I do not have time to do this bake just before Easter, I have decided to embark on this 5 days before. I have chosen a recipe from my favorite pasty chef. However, I have refrained from saying who he is this time round because the end result of my incapable baking skill did not do justice to him.
There will not be a recipe posting and how to in this post given the end result was really lousy. I will share with you my process however.
To this croissant recipe, the changes I made is the following:
I do not have fresh yeast as the recipe call for nor have I work with fresh yeast before. After doing some reading and all, instant dry yeast can be use at 40% of the weight of the fresh yeast. So that will make the instant yeast component at 4.8g. I only use 4g given that I am using the slow retarding way to do the first rise.
The only twist I have is to simply transform this croissant into the hot cross version by doing the following:
Additional ingredients:
1) Black currant and Raisin soaked in orange juice to rehydrate it.
2) Cinnamon, Nutmeg and Sugar= According to taste and I mixed all together
3) Egg Wash ( an egg plus salt)
4) Anna Olsen’s Hot cross bun Icing Recipe
– 3/4 Cup Icing Sugar (sifted)
– 1 Tbsp Milk
– Stir both together to give a thick consistency and then spoon it into a piping bag.
Assembly before baking:
Cut the dough up into triangles. in this case, isosceles triangle shape.
Take a piece of the dough. Give it an egg wash before sprinkling the spice sugar onto it. Sprinkled some rehydrated fruits and roll it like a normal croissant shape. Proof it one last time and I gave it an egg wash before baking it in a preheated oven. The oven was preheated at 200 degree. Once you place in the oven, do remember to lower the temp to 180 degree and bake for 20 minutes.
Once done, take it out and let cool completely before piping a cross onto the croissant as per picture. Let it sit for an hour to set the icing.
After baking Thoughts:
1) I still have issue rolling the dough and the butter leaks in my 3rd fold. I am not able to roll it into a 0.5 mm thick final dough and I wonder if its because I just do not have the strength or the dough is too large for me to handle. It cannot be a issue where the dough is not relaxed enough. I have rested the dough for about 24 hrs between each fold.
While it is doing the last round of proofing, it is really thick.
2) Butter melted really fast. I wonder why. I did each folding at night and the weather has been rather cool.
3) As the croissant is baking, tonnes of butter leaked out. My croissant slided and changed into a totally different shape from those seen before baking.
Just beforee baking, it is a beautiful croissant shape:
4) I bake these for 18 minutes and realised that it is not well cooked as you can see from the intersection. I figure it has to do with the thickness of the dough. As I have mentioned prior, I am not able to roll it thinly.
As I wrote this post, I have another dough proofing in the fridge. Its going to be a long weekend. I will once again post the result of this 2nd attempt. If you are reading and you know my problems, please tell me what I could have done wrongly. The entire batch and 5 days worth of work ended up in the bin. I was devastated.
At the meantime, enough my failure.
IWANNABAKETHISTODAY 