Croissants and Danish Pastries are the new baguettes. FACT. We made a shed load of them last week as we finally got stuck into laminated doughs.

Laminating doughs with butter is one of the key skills of Viennoiserie, and it can be pretty tricky. Get it right and you end up with beautiful, flaky, buttery pastry. Win. Get it wrong and you can end up with greasy products or a clogged up sheeter. Lose.

As before, the doughs are yeasted and mixed in a very similar way, but the new techniques came into play after the initial proof. One of the most important things with lamination is to keep everything cold. You want your butter and dough to be almost frozen with a ‘plastic’ like consistency. This enables you to sheet the dough thin and ‘lock in’ the butter over a series of folds creating alternating layers of pastry and fat.

It’s been pretty hot here in San Fran recently, so this has made the whole lamination process a lot tougher. We’ve been heavily relying on the blast freezer to quickly chill our doughs in between folds so we can work on them without the butter melting, or the dough getting too soft.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but once you’ve got lamination down (not that I’m saying I’m quite there yet), you’ve got a whole host of tasty shizzle at your finger tips based around croissant and Danish pastry formulas.

We made a range of different croissants both with and without pre-ferments. Plain ones, whole wheat ones, ham and cheese ones, almond ones, and pain au chocolat, all different kinds of Danish, lunettes, bear claws, snails, a CRAZY Breton pastry called koign-amann which contains enough butter and sugar to kill an army, and thats just the tip of the iceberg.

In creating all this new sweet stuff, we’ve learned a bunch of new techniques. Using the sheeting machines, different types and styles of shaping, making fillings for the pastries. It felt a bit like we took in enough information for a month, let alone a week.

Oh and it wasn’t all lamination, lamination, lamination. A special shout has to go out to an AMAZONGGG cake that we made at the end of the week. The mighty Bienenstich or ‘bee sting’ cake. It’s a brioche based dough, filled with diplomat cream and topped with a molten mixture of honey, sugar, butter and almonds that sets hard. Properly delicious stuff. If you ever see it on sale, buy it. You’ll thank me.

Next week we’re finishing up Viennoiserie, finishing the week with a two day practical. Wish me luck.

The final course of our valentines meal was a lemon posset with heart shaped shortbread biscuits (forgive the cheese).

The Posset is pretty much as old school as it gets with roots in 12th century England where it was drunk for it’s medicinal properties. I’m not sure this recipe could ever be described as good for you, cream and sugar tend to be frowned upon these days, but it is delicious, and very easy to make.

Ingredients

For the Posset

300ml double cream

75g caster sugar

1 lemon zested and juiced

For the shortbread

45g icing sugar

90g plain flour

30g cornflour

15g ground almonds

125g butter

Lemon zest

Golden caster sugar

Method

First up, put the cream and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 3 minutes, making sure it doesn’t boil over, and then take off the heat. Allow to cool to room temperature, add the lemon juice and then whisk. Divide the mixture by pouring into two glasses and then put in the fridge to set.

Now make the shortbread biscuits. Sift the flour, cornflour and icing sugar into a food processor and then add the ground almonds. Cut the butter into cubes, add to the processor bowl, and then pulse until the butter has been blitzed, leaving you with a breadcrumb like mixture.

Tip the mixture out onto lightly floured surface, and bring it all together to form a smooth dough. Wrap in clingfilm, put in the fridge and set your oven to 180 degrees C.

When the oven is up to temperature, remove the dough, and using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll it out to around half a centimetre thick. Using a pastry cutter, cut out the dough and place on grease proof paper on a flat baking tray. Grate a little lemon zest and sprinkle each biscuit with a little golden caster sugar before popping in the oven for around 10 minutes.

The biscuits are ready when they are a pale yellow in colour and golden brown around the edges. Remove from the baking tray and cool on a rack. The biscuits will be soft and brittle, so be careful.

Remove the posset from the fridge to warm it up a little, and then serve with a couple of the cooled shortbread biscuits.A class act.