i can't believe it's still butter

I'm officially halfway through my first term at school and I am starting to feel like a real chef. One who knows how many ounces are in a quart, how to use baker’s percentages in recipes, and how much flavor butter and other fats can add to plain dough. That's right; it was butter me up time in the kitchen again this week. After the slight mishap in class last week, our group was determined not to slip up again yesterday. The butter had other plans for us however.

Our assignment was to make Danish pastry dough, blitz puff pastry dough, an apple compote filling and chocolate icing. The chocolate icing was a piece of cake (and I wish I had cake to put it on). The apple compote was also quite simple, once we learned the quickest, safest way to dice up an apple. First you cut the apple into sheets, then sticks, then squares. And you get to keep all of your fingers. Genius. Best thing I learned all day. The blitz puff pastry dough was fun to make and very similar to pie dough except that you have to give it three folds and roll it out a few times to make sure the fat is evenly distributed. This helps the flaky layers magically appear after baking. When this dough was ready, I styled it into a few different designs from my baking book and squirted on some delicious blueberry filling.

These turned out better than I thought, although the dough was not quite as tasty as the Danish puff pastry dough. Once the Danish dough itself was ready and had cooled, along with a large hunk of butter, we spread the butter onto the dough and began the fold in process. The main concern here is trying to keep the dough and the butter the same temperature. If the butter is too soft or warm it will attempt to escape the dough and ooze out onto the table. Which ours did. Once my butter jumped so far out of the dough that it would have won first prize in the long jump competition at a high school track meet. And even after some extra time in the refrigerator, we were unable to get this dough thin enough to fold up like the fashionable pastries above. So we decided to throw some apple compote and cinnamon and sugar in the middle, roll it up like a log and cut it into cinnamon rolls. Anything with this much butter, cinnamon and sugar is bound to taste good, even if it's not the intended final product.

Here's hoping that in my final showdown with butter during next week's practical, I win. And now let's take one additional look at the most splendid pastry I've ever made... 

It's a beautiful specimen of flaky goodness. And I'll be eating it tomorrow morning for breakfast. Here's to a tasty Monday morning filled with blueberry happiness!