this weekend i tackled a long-term baking ambition: making my first laminated pastry dough. croissants were the obvious starting place, of course, though i couldn’t resist throwing chocolate into half of them to make pain au chocolat. i have a new marble pastry slab (seriously, having married-person’s dishes is awesome), the Standard Baking Company’s cookbook, most of a weekend free, and a pound of high quality butter.

step one: destroy the kitchen

butter. just butter.

ready to roll

look closely. that’s 81 alternating layers of dough and butter.

ready to go into the oven

just out of the oven

Om nom nom nom…nom nom nom

we ate two of these in rapid succession. the only thing that held us back from eating more was probably the fact that i did the math and concluded that each one had nearly 2 tablespoons of butter in it.

seriously, these were labor intensive (from sourcing the ingredients to heaving the marble pastry slab around to the 36-hour start-to-finish process), but they weren’t all that hard. it just took time and careful adherence to directions. and by time, i mean, i arrange my whole weekend around the needs of the pastry dough. but i didn’t have nearly this much success with my first (or fifth) loaf of bread dough. this makes me think that pastry falls further on the chemistry side of the baking scale, (this is my imaginary cooking scale, where one end is intuition and the other end is chemistry. bread just might be the perfect food because it falls squarely in the middle).