After reading real bakers post that croissant making is an 11 on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, I thought for sure I was going to mess something up. I followed the croissant recipe in The Secrets of Baking as much as I could, but found that I was still rough and impatient with this two-day dough. And since rough and impatient are not good things when it comes to pastry, I popped these bad boys in the oven expecting my first #bakingbootcamp failure.
Mixing ingredients, 6 hours of rising, 3 passes at laminating the dough, 6 more hours of rising, cutting then rolling, 2 hours of proofing… Who was the baking mastermind that came up with all these rules?? And then there were all of the instructions that I impatiently ignored: perfectly squared edges, perfectly measured cuts. Instead, I depended on my construction mind and super steady hand.
What came out of the oven was a gazillion calories of accomplishment. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw croissants so layered, so golden. I facebooked about it, I tweeted about, I brought them to my co-workers, I ran up the steepest hill in town to deliver to my favorite neighbors. And after all this, I still feel… I feel “happy of myself”!
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Cheers to challenging yourself in twenty thirteen!