Happy New Year!

Ah, not that much new, but still having lots of fun with the bakery. Well, really just recovering from the snow and the wedding show, etc. And I just wanted to put something new up, but I haven't taken any pictures in the past few days. This weekend we visited Bakery Nouveau in West Seattle. Wow. That is what every bakery wants to be when they grow up. Cherry-almond croissants. Pizza. Sicilian (thick-crust) pizza. Artisan bread. Eclairs. Chocolates. Raisin pinwheels. Chocolate hazelnut slices. Passion fruit dome. Brioche. Pineapple Brioche. Baguettes. Um, not that I did an inventory or anything, but Yum!
This little darlin' is mine, cute and delicious, if I do say so myself. But the ones at Bakery Nouveau are divine!

Chocolate Croissants!

I have this love/hate thing with Chocolate Croissants - I want to love them, because they have two of my favorite things in them - chocolate and croissants.
But I end up not liking them, mainly because they're not sweet enough I think.

So, with a fresh supply of Dr. Oetker yeast - thanks mom! -

I decided to try croissants again at home, hoping for better results all around. Even though I feel like I have puff pastry down cold, and croissant dough is nothing more than puff pastry with yeast, I've struggled with croissants - not rising, butter leaking out onto the baking pan, etc. So, I took another run at them. I used the recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Pastry Bible, combined with a little bit of Julia Child, and the results were very good. I think the two hours in the fridge makes a huge difference in how easy it is to work. I ended up making about 2 pounds of dough and worked it 1/3 at a time, with the rest staying cold - it was perfect.

These are the unbaked chocolate and plain croissants. The dough went together well - better than my photos! I think I forgot to turn on the digital macro function until all the raw dough was baket, but anyway, you can see that they shaped up nicely. The yeast was past its pull date but it worked nonetheless, though a bit more slowly I think. Anyway, I used semisweet chocolate in the chocolate version, and it turned out to be just right - bittersweet is just too dry and, well, bitter, for breakfast. I did not increase the amount of sugar in the dough (only 2 T.) but I might double that to 1/4 cup next time.

Here is a finished pan of assorted treates - the scraps went to Scout! The unbaked dough is supposed to freeze well, and with the fat content I'm sure it does, but I didn't freeze any this time. The recipe made about 19 or 20 pieces that were fairly small by current standards, but I think just about right.