handmade croissants- for my dear friends Franck and Suzanne

Some time ago, a dear friend bemoaned the cost of croissants at Wegmans, and I have to agree with her. At $1.50 a pop,  ten dollars does not quite feed my whole family. Not to mention that two minutes later, everyone is hungry again. And ready to have a heart attack.

Not a lot of bang for the buck.

Completely yummy, though.

 The thing about croissants, though, is the recipes are often long, complicated, tedious, and unforgiving. I've seen ones that take three days to make! The other thing, is that most of them call for the ritual banging of the butter into the dough.

You take a block of butter, and bang it with a rolling pin until it's thin and oblong, and then roll and roll and roll it into layers.  With three children, I'm not bloody likely to add to the noise in the house by banging butter.

And I have to wonder if the person who came up with the recipe owned a knife. Just curious.

So I made croissants today, using the first recipe at the link above. Easy, peasy, rice and cheesy. Instead of banging out the butter and giving myself a headache, I sliced the butter into thin pats and spread those over the upper two thirds of the dough. Then, I followed the recipe to a T, which was a mistake. I kept thinking, these need an egg wash. Really need an egg wash. I should gloss them up before I put them in the oven.

I forgot. Into the oven they went, and out they came.

Delicious. And not shiny. So next time, I'll beat an egg with two tablespoons of water and brush them before I bake.

I couldn't wait, and baked the last batch with egg wash- beautiful!