People ask why I like going to WordCamps so much and it’s hard to articulate but here’s a story which starts out innocuously enough but ends up with me doubting my very sanity as if I was living in some Edgar Allan Poe story. Read on, if you dare…

Back in january I was at WordCamp Phoenix which was, in all respects, an absolutely top notch WordCamp event. Like any good WordCamp it had a genius bar which I had volunteered my time for and, at which, Michelle came up to me with some questions about her blog. She’s experiencing a year of living curiously and blogging daily about her experiences. At some point we realized that our blogs both had the word “diary” in them and that we shared a birthday. Interesting little bits of synchronicity. I answered her questions as best I could but got the feeling she left with more questions than answers so when I got home I sent her a couple videos of people who were answering her questions in way more detail and coherence than I had.

As I lay here in the darkness watching my sanity slip away I think to myself “Why, why did I have to go the extra step and send her those videos. Why did I give her…my email address”. How different would my life be now if I had never clicked the send button. (we call this foreshadowing)

In our continuing email conversations she mentions that it might be kind of fun, since we both enjoy cooking and writing blogs about cooking, that we could come up with a couple recipes, cook them on the same day, and then blog about them from both the male and female perspective. We figured we should have two kinds of foods that also had a certain gender bias. I think this actually sounds like a lot of fun and a good way to spice up the blogging thing so I wholeheartedly agree. To that end we chose the following:

Her food: Chocolate croissants (a la that movie, “It’s Complicated”)
His food: Dishwasher lasagna. Yes, it’s lasagna you cook in the dishwasher.

We are starting with this post from Lake Lure Cottage Kitchen. Seems time consuming but not overly complicated. I can make and then roll out dough. I’ve done it before. Never as many times as you have to for croissants but, c’mon, how hard can it be. (more foreshadowing)

Before we started we had scoffed at Nigella Lawson’s method for this which was to start with pre-made dough and just cram chocolate into it. We scoffed! Look who’s scoffing now…not us…certainly not us…

For compare and contrast purposes, you can read Michelle’s take on this entire event later. First let me tell you my story.

I started off with a good breakfast and then went to the grocery store for all the fixin’s. The base ingredients aren’t too complicated. flour, butter, yeast, milk, sugar, salt. Easy. A long as you remember to get all those ingredients. We’ll come back to this later.

I go home, pull out the mixer, dust it off and discover that at some point in the past my mixer and toaster got too close to one another and had a bit of a dust up ending up with one melted mixer cord.

Keep the mixer and the toaster away from each other

One quick trip to the hardware store later and I have a replacement plug for my melted cord. We’re cooking with gas now.
Lowe’s to the rescue!

Except we aren’t really cooking with gas because when I went to the store and bought all those ingredients I forgot to buy yeast. Back in the car, back to the store for 3 packets of yeast. Thankfully I saved myself yet another trip to the store when I realized that the rolling pin I have is almost certainly not going to work. The rolling pin I have is a bottle of wine. I’ve used it before for simple things but I’m fairly certain this is going to be more stress than my “rolling pin” can take and I don’t fancy the idea of shards of wine bottle in my hands or in my croissants.
OK in a pinch but not for heavy duty use like today

Now that I have all my ingredients I throw them into the bowl and turn on the mixer and eventually end up with the following beautiful ball of dough.
Ain’t it purty?

It really was a beautiful ball of dough. The problem being that an hour later it was the same size. It was supposed to rise and double in size. Somehow in the process of researching my croissants I had flipped to another recipe that had better pictures of the folding and rolling out process but had far less detail on the actual making of the dough because any idiot knows how to do that. Wanna bet? Not this idiot. I missed the entire “bloom your yeast” step and made what was effectively room temperature dough which, if you’re wondering, doesn’t fly. Michelle had earlier in the day had said

Hey, whatever works

Unfortunately it didn’t work, I thought it did but that was just wishful thinking. After another hour I gave up and just decided that un-risen dough would have to work. While I was waiting for the dough to sit there and not do squat I had to massage some butter. Croissants are all about layers of dough and butter and how this starts is with what is effectively a slab of butter the size of a (thin) hardback book. Butter comes in sticks, not hardback shaped slabs so you have to massage it. This was easily the most fun part of the entire day.

Roll it flat. Lay in the slab of butter. Fold. Turn. Roll out. Fold. Throw into fridge to rise and chill. Here’s the important part. AT NO POINT DO YOU WANT THE BUTTER TO BECOME SOFT! I’m not totally sure why because I’m not French but I hear this part is important. So you repeat this 3 times with 30 minutes to 2 hours in the fridge between steps. Roll, fold, turn, roll, fold, fridge.
Butter, swaddled like a baby

When you’re done with all that folding and rolling you have 729 layers of butter between as many layers of pastry. You cut the whole mess in half and throw half of it in the freezer or fridge for a rainy day.
729 layers, go ahead and count them

At this point you roll it flat one more time and cut into triangles which then get rolled into the actual croissants. This is where it all fell apart for me. The butter started to melt and it had never risen which is why the gluten in the dough was like rubber bands and it wouldn’t stay rolled out or thinned out. Cutting the triangles was like cutting taut rubber bands and they immediately started shrinking not to mention the fact that they were sticking like crazy to my work surface and making a mess.
Swiftly shrinking triangles

You’re supposed to end up with more than 6 but this is where my patience wore thin and my experimental side took over and said “we’re making 6 really thick croissants just to see what happens”. I tossed the chocolate into them, rolled them up, glazed them with egg wash and let them sit while the oven het up.
What evil hath this man wrought!

Surprisingly enough they turned out not horrible. They aren’t croissants but I’ll tell you what. You throw a slab of butter the size of a hardback book at some pastry dough and you end up with something edible in the end. I think my roommate said it best though. I told him there were 6 in the bag and to just leave me the malformed big one and he could have whatever he wanted. The next day he’s at work and I get the following

And so I sit, battle scarred and clinically insane but at least I can say I tried it. I can hold my head up high and say how one time made croissants from scratch and lived to tell the tale.