Joe and Sophie make croissants and then gain 9 lbs

For our five year anniversary, I arranged for Joe and I to take a cooking class at a local culinary school making croissants. I thought it would be a good way to maximize our butter intake. I mean... love intake?

No recipe because um, these take three days (or one really crappy day) to make and I'm not up to typing all that up. This looks pretty similar to the recipe and method we used though.


Here's the dough we started with. Obviously we couldn't make it all from scratch, this wasn't croissant making summer camp. Our teacher showed us how to make croissants from scratch using dough in various stages and provided us with dough to work with. So we started with dough in the final stages: this is what you would have on the third day. Look at all those layers already! You get those from doing three "3-folds" on the prior days.


At this stage we could roll out our dough, letting it relax for a bit between rollings. This is my sheet. I assure you it was the best in the class.

Actually, the teacher did compliment my very impressive dough rectangle and I was proud, though I saw him compliment some severely ugly rolls later that day. But I'll take what I can get.


Next we cut our rectangles into thirds: the bottom 2 thirds were cut smaller than the upper 1/3. We used the small sections to fill and roll up and the big section to form traditional crescent croissants.
Here are my cheese rolls. They were supposed to have ham and cheese but I don't eat meat so cheese it was. These ones were just rolled up from the bottom, pretty easy peasy.


Here are some of my finished rolls. Some of these are filled with cheese and the rest are filled with chocolate chips. A few of my chocolate chips didn't make it into the croissants because they mysteriously migrated into my mouth.


This is our baking sheet filled with our respective rolls, Joe's are the ones filled with ham and mine are the pretty ones, obviously.

I'm kidding. Joe's were very pretty too.

Hey, did you know that rolling crescents that are pretty is HARD? Here are some of mine in various stages of hideousness.

But it didn't matter how ugly they were because they were baked and all hideousness was canceled out by sweet, buttery innards. Here are some of the regular rolls, baked. Mmm. Is there cheese or chocolate inside? IT'S A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE.

This one is chocolate filled. Sweet, sweet chocolate.


Look at that flaky, buttery goodness. This one is ham and cheese. Obviously.

I've never been a huge fan of croissants but I'd only ever had the ones from grocery stores. And really, anything is delicious when it contains six sticks of butter and is fresh out of the oven. These ones were amazing and I ate about five that morning. And then my stomach exploded. Luckily the healing properties of butter are amazing.

The class was really fun and we got to take home about nine million croissants. Definitely worth the money, although my hips may disagree.