When I learned that this month's Daring Bakers Challenge was Danish dough, the first thought that went through my mind was, "how in the world am I going to be able to keep my son home for at least 4 hours straight so I can roll the dough?". And then my second thought was, "I better lower the air conditioning right now!". So yes, in that sense this was a true challenge.
It has been a while since I have made laminated doughs. As a matter of fact, I believe this is the first time that I have ever made laminated dough at home. Laminated doughs require a cold environment, cold surfaces and a long, long time. I had to reserve this task for a weekend so I could have some help with my little boy. He will not stay home all morning or afternoon so I can bake, so having an extra set of hands was crucial for me to finish this challenge.
Since timing is everything I decided to start about mid-afternoon so I could let the dough rest overnight and shape, proof and bake the following morning. It has been hot, hot, hot here lately so I had to make sure the air conditioning was turned down and that no cooking needed to be done while I was rolling the dough. I worked as quickly as I could and given that this was a small batch, it was not too terrible to handle. I remember the large batches of croissant dough that I had to make in past lives and that's when I really had to work fast so the dough never got warm. But I also had a sheeter back then.
This dough is soft and very, very aromatic with all that orange zest, vanilla bean and of course, cardammon. I struggled during the rolling process trying to keep the lock-in butter cold. It was getting sticky at times. Streching the dough so it relaxed was difficult because my hands were melting the butter a bit, but I finally made it.
I divided the dough in half and decided to make a large braid and some individual pastries. I filled the large braid with hazelnut frangipane and some black cherry preserves that I have from back home. With the other half of the dough, I made some mini cinnamon sugar snails that I topped with pistachio crumble and some frangipane diamonds that I topped with fresh strawberries.
Thank you very much to Kelly of Sass & Veracity and Ben of What’s Cookin’? for hosting this month's challenge. Please visit their blogs for the recipe. For other Daring Bakers' creations, please visit the Daring Bakers Blogroll.
Post Title
→Daring Bakers: Danish Braid and the Patience for Laminated Doughs
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→http://mercymadame.blogspot.com/2008/06/daring-bakers-danish-braid-and-patience.html
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