working hard...happily

Happiness can be hard work. Many would say that having to work hard for something makes you appreciate the end results even more than if something is just given to you. For example, you can stop by your local grocery store or bakery and let your taste buds enjoy the buttery, flaky layers of a croissant in the time it takes you to drive there. Or you can spend the majority of your Sunday mixing up croissant dough, letting it rise, using all of your strength folding European Style Plugra butter into the dough while allowing for chill time in the refrigerator in between rolls, 

 
then REALLY using all of your strength to roll the dough out into one big flat rectangle ( I used my new/very old rolling pin from my Aunt Val’s collection to get the dough really thin), 

 
cutting out triangles, 

filling and rolling up the dough, proofing the croissants,

egg washing the tops and finally putting the croissants into a hot oven while thinking about how nice it would be to have a convection oven to bake bread in. Sigh. 

But then the happiness arrives…

freshly baked croissants made by yours truly for a snack and dinner and breakfast the next morning! They barely made it to breakfast because we inhaled most of them immediately, but happiness from my hard work is still with me days later. I did manage to make breakfast Sunday morning while the dough was rising, so we did not survive on croissants alone. But I’m pretty sure I could if need be.

I also managed to whip up a small batch of royal icing (aka sugar glue) to finish up my nougatine centerpiece. It was good piping practice for me and makes for a much nicer centerpiece overall.

Continuing with our theme of hard work, let me tell you a little about the world of chocolate. In class on Saturday, we tempered chocolate. While this was not extremely hard work, it does require a lot of patience and a good thermometer. Also, water is chocolate’s worst enemy, so there’s no crying in chocolate making. The bottom line is that chocolate is very fragile and you have to keep it at the right temperatures during the tempering process if you want the end result to give you the happy shine and snap of a good piece of chocolate. My group tempered two batches of milk chocolate and we got it right both times. We used the tabling method to cool the chocolate down.

We made knackerli of all sorts. Ours included a mix of almond slivers, candied hazelnuts and pistachios, dried apricots, bing cherries and currants.

 

We also cut out large pieces of chocolate for our chocolate boxes that will be completed this weekend. The chocolate is poured onto pieces of acetate and then scored out when it's cooled a bit. I made a wood grain design on my box sides by running a special tool over the milk chocolate and then covering them with dark chocolate. You’ll have to wait until next week to see the final product, but here’s the work in progress.

We’ll be making all kinds of bonbons this weekend and filling up our boxes with them. It would make a lovely Valentine’s Day gift, but unfortunately, the holiday has already passed. I plan on sharing them with my Valentine anyways though. Just look at what he made me for dinner last week.

Homemade pasta and sauce from a local pasta shop that he spruced up with some pancetta and yellow pepper (plus salad and garlic bread). Just looking at these photos brings back happy memories from the meal and our first Hallmark holiday as marrieds. I feel very lucky to have a husband that values hard work in the kitchen (and likes wearing orange aprons) as much as I do.

I think he's holding the knife in case I tried to hijack the making of our dinner. I didn't.