A Good Good Friday

Friday was busy and fun and quite exciting as we were all extremely ready for the forth coming rest of the weekend!!! Thursday we baked up a batch of plain croissants and refrigerated them overnight. With the now day old croissants we made Almond Croissants. OMG!!! I'm debating going into what makes these so scrumptious but since over the Internet you're unable to indulge I may have to crack the facade and tell you what's in them. But first take a peek:

We took the day old croissants sliced them in half (like a sandwich) & soaked each half in a syrup which has been steeping oranges, lemons & vanilla. Then we filled the croissants with almond cream which is creamed butter & sugar with some almond powder. Another layer of almond cream atop the croissants, sliced almonds and powdered sugar for show and voila...Almond Croissants.

Now I have a tendency to eat more than one of our croissants at a time...they are quite scrumptious, however I've only had one of these almond croissants. They are super heavy, simply imagine all the butter in just one of these delightful snacks.

Again we made chocolate croissants, plain croissants, and the almond croissants. I'm getting much better on my rolling technique with croissants. They are coming out less chubby and with more layers. By accident the other day someone flipped a heater switch on our proofer and not only did our croissants proof really, really well but it was so toasty in there the butter began melting out of our pastry puff. Our croissants still came out quite good and Friday we upped the temp to a safer temp and we had some great results. Chef said we've made our best croissants to date:

We worked on our Danishes also. Remember, we are using the croissant dough only we're rolling it differently than we roll it for croissants. The missing elements when using croissant dough for danishes is that there are no eggs and less fat. We made apricot and pear danishes and over all I think mine came out fairly ok:

When I rolled my dough before cutting the slices I rolled it too small. Had I rolled out my croissant dough to have been wider, more than longer, then these danishes would've been larger around. No harm, no foul. They were quite delicious!

Of course we made baguettes and I'm still not getting them rolled properly. My baguettes continuously come out a bit loose & while they still taste great they aren't up to French baguette standards. A co-worker told me yesterday that my baguettes have just the rest crustiness in their crust...not to tough with great texture. Last night I was @ Henry's Marketplace and they have baguettes at the checkout line and so I stuck my hand in one of the bags to feel the bread and they were super duper crusty. The crust on them was rock solid...seriously. I definitely do not like that in a bread, even a baguette, so the compliment my co-worker gave me was great!

The surprise of the day was Hamburger Buns. When we made the agenda for the day hamburger buns weren't on it but at the last minute Chef realized we had some extra time so we got to make these. Initially I wasn't overly excited about making these, though I figured the practice with bread dough would be good for me. However, once we got them on a sheet pan and ready to proof I was in love with them. You'd understand if only you could see them:

Look how monstrous these are!!! I altered my dinner plans to make sure I was able to dig into, at least, one of these. I enjoyed them so much I'll be making hamburgers again tonight!!!

We did not make any brioche today. The dough wasn't taken out of the freezer in time and so we're going to make brioche on Tuesday. Fine with me, as long as it gets made :)!!!

I don't know much about next week's agenda. That's fine by me, I've still got a lot to process just from this past week. I'll be typing up recipes most of this weekend (after all we made a lot of stuff this week) and then I'll go into recharge mode and get myself ready for Monday morning!!!

Enjoy your weekend!