The croissant chronicles
If I told you that I was going to make a real, concerted effort to actually update this blog more than once every century, would you believe me? Most likely, you wouldn’t. And of course that’s assuming you’re even able to read these words under the thick layer of dust that’s accumulated here since my last post. So, just to prove that I really am capable of putting pen to paper (um, fingers to keyboard?) and writing something longer than a 140-character snippet, I’m going to tell you a story about the time I baked croissants and turned my kitchen into a war zone in the process.
In retrospect, it was one of those undertakings that was simultaneously The Worst Idea Ever and The Best Idea Ever – a rare commingling of success and total, complete disaster. I’ll go ahead and kill the suspense right away by letting you know that the successful part, thankfully, was the outcome of the actual croissants. They may have ended up looking like chunky, oversized impostors of the slender and gracefully curved specimens of pastry perfection found throughout Paris (and, okay, also a few good bakeries around Victoria), and they may have been just a touch more dough-y in the middle than I would have liked, but they had that trademark flaky crust and delicious buttery flavour, and therefore they were good. What was not so good, however, was the way my kitchen looked while I was preparing these croissants.
Those of you with baking experience will know that one of the first steps in the croissant-making process is to soften an unsettlingly large amount of butter, then shape it into a flattened rectangular block. The problem with this is that the butter needs to be kept very cold the entire time, and cold butter is difficult to work with. Reallydifficult. I kicked off the process by enthusiastically pounding a fresh-from-the-fridge block of butter with a rolling pin – which resulted in The Upstairs Neighbour pounding on her floor in retaliation but had little effect on the shape of the butter – and then I changed strategies, cut the butter into chunks, tossed it into a bowl, and attacked it with my little hand-held mixer. Now, I like to believe that I’m not the only person who has moments of intense stupidity while in the kitchen. In fact, I like to tell myself that it’s normal that I can’t whip up a cake without ending up with flour in my hair, or that other people manage to slice half their fingernail off with a freshly-sharpened chef’s knife all the time. But even I have a hard time convincing myself that anyone else could turn their kitchen into a war zone, complete with flying chunks of shrapnel.
Because that’s exactly what happened when my underpowered, drugstore-purchased, dirt-cheap mixer (bought well before my baking obsession kicked in) was forced to churn its way through a bowl full of rock-hard butter chunks: First, the mixer started giving off little wisps of grey smoke while making a discomfiting grinding noise, then the beater blades actually bent as they hit the butter, and then, in that split second where a situation slides from precarious to disastrous, the bent beaters locked together and somehow, in an amazing feat of physics, ejected themselves from the mixer, flew out of the bowl at a shockingly high speed, and hit the kitchen wall hard enough to leave a small dent. And while this was happening, pieces of butter were spraying everywhere. The floor. The wall. That annoying little gap between the counter and the stove. And of course, the ceiling.
Next time, I’ll think twice before tackling any classic French pastries in my own kitchen. Actually, no, that’s a lie. Next time, I’ll buy some decent equipment, wear an apron, and possibly even some safety goggles, but I definitely won’t think twice before taking on the most challenging recipes I can find.
The final product. It looks so innocent, doesn’t it?
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