Two days ago I started making croissants, in anticipation of having a human guinea pig (Karel's friend) staying the night and wanting breakfast the next morning. It actually doesn't take a full three days to make them--it's just easier to do the timing that way: make the dough and mix the butter on day one, rolling and turning on day two, and bake on day three. It amounts to maybe 90 minutes of work, total, but in between is a lot of letting the dough chill in the fridge.
Except that I'd utterly and completely failed to read that the dough needs to rise for three hours before baking. This was my fault, of course--but I feel compelled to add that the recipe was 3 pages of single-spaced typing, full of typos (someone had just literally transcribed Julia Child's directions), and did not include directions on how to slice and dice the triangles. On top of all that, I don't have a rolling pin, so while I should have been reading ahead, I was busy flattening some fairly substantial dough packets with a glass jar. .
In spite of all that, I nevertheless managed to churn out some fairly decent-looking croissants, and just when I was fit to burst with pride, I read, "Let them rise for 3 hours at room temperature." It was 9 am. Breakfast was at 10.
We ended up having the croissants that come out of the carton instead, but I've still got half a recipe of dough. Picture posting soon, I hope :-)
Did you still say they were yours? :p
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