Cheats Croissant Dough

And a recipe for Cruffins

Hello Everyone!

I, for one, am thrilled the temperature has dropped a little over the past week. Baking in the heat and with disgustingly high humidity is not my idea of fun. Spending my days in front of a hot oven? Let's just say, it wasn’t pretty. Now that it's a touch cooler, your bread will proof as you’d expect, your butter won't go from solid to liquid in the blink of an eye, and you’ll be able to bake without turning into a ball of sweat. With the kitchen a little more tolerable I took the opportunity to whip up a batch of my ‘Cheats Croissant Dough’ and use it to make some cruffins; if I had attempted this last week, it would have been a recipe for disaster.

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Before we get to the recipe, I wanted to tell you about a fun event I have coming up. If you follow me on social media, you might have seen that I have been a guest on the Ask Ronna (& Bryan) podcast a few times, a hilarious comedy advice podcast that is a weekly treat. For their first-ever live show, they are crossing the pond and setting up shop at Kings Place Theatre in London. They’re doing a single show, on July 14th, with special guests Sue Perkins, the Irish comedian Gearoid Farrelly, and myself. I can't wait for the show, it is bound to be a brilliantly funny night, and I am sure there will be cake involved somehow. If you fancy coming along, you can get tickets from Kings Place. You can also stream the show live, if you can’t make it to London.

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Okay, so croissant dough. Or should I say cheats croissant dough. I am the strange person that actually really enjoys making traditional croissant dough. All the rolling and folding is somehow quite therapeutic. But I know I am in the minority. There is also plenty of times I want a really flaky croissant-esque dough, but want to make it quicker and with a significantly lower difficulty level. I have been using a version of this recipe for years, the first version appeared in my book Patisserie Made Simple (that version utilised a food processor), and even before that, I was using that same method to make flaky cinnamon buns for my old bakery business down on Maltby St Market. Over the years, I adapted the method, trying to improve on it, trying to make it more foolproof. The recipe below is the current version, a recipe that creates wonderfully flaky pastry in the style of croissant dough.

Ironically, because it's called 'cheats croissant dough’, I actually never use the dough actually to make croissants. If I am making croissants, I want them to be as good as possible; as much as I love the pastries this dough can be used to make, it's not quite flaky enough to make a perfect croissant. It does, however, make amazing Danish style pastries, think pain aux raisin, or flaky cinnamon rolls etc etc. A few years ago, in my column for Olive Magazine, I used this pastry to make one of my all-time favourite recipes, ‘Nduja and Fennel danishes. The pastry was covered with an ‘nduja fennel seed compound butter and layered with gruyere and prosciutto before being rolled up and then cut into individual pieces. I can't tell you how good these were, although I’m sure you can use your imagination.

For todays newsletter, I am including a guide to making the pastry itself and then for paid subscribers, you’ll also get access to a recipe using the pastry to make cruffins. For the cruffins I went with a favourite flavour combination of mine. They are filled with a little milk chocolate ganache and then a fragrant cardamom pastry cream. The outside of the cruffins is also coated in a layer of orange-infused sugar.

Cheats Croissant Dough

250g plain flour

250g strong white bread flour

2 tbsp caster sugar

10g fine sea salt

14g fast-action dried yeast

50g unsalted butter, room temperature

250g unsalted butter, frozen, for laminating

For the dough, add the two flours, sugar, salt and yeast and mix to combine. If kneading by hand add the butter and rub into the flour until the butter disappears into the flour. If kneading in a stand mixer simply add the butter to the bowl.

Pour 265ml lukewarm water into the bowl and knead to form a smooth and elastic ball of dough. By hand, this will take around 15 minutes, and in the mixer, it will take around 10 minutes. Shape the dough into a ball and place back into the bowl, then cover and set aside until doubled in size; this will take about 45-60 minutes.

Tip out the dough and press it into a rough square shape, roughly 20/22cm wide, wrap in clingfilm and then freeze for 40 minutes. The aim is not to freeze the dough so that it is hard but to make it easier to handle and to stop it from proofing.

Remove the dough from the freezer, and on a lightly floured worksurface, roll out the dough into a large rectangle, about 45x25cm. Remove the butter from the freezer, and grate the entire pack of butter over the dough using the coarse side of a box grater. You want to make this layer nice and even, but it's a cheats dough, so don’t worry too much. You also want to leave a 2cm border free of butter, along one of the shorter sides of dough.

Instead of traditional laminating we are going to keep things really simple and just roll the whole thing up, like a big Swiss roll. Start the roll from the end of the dough which has no butter. Once the dough is all rolled up use a rolling pin to flatten the dough slightly. Wrap the dough up in clingfilm and refrigerate it for 20-30 minutes. Once chilled, roll out the dough as before into a 25x45cm rectangle, and then roll it up one final time. The finished dough can then be refrigerated overnight until you are ready to use it. You can use the dough after a 60-minute rest in the fridge, but I like to leave it overnight as it will be easier to roll out after an extended rest. Once the dough is made you can also freeze it for up to a month. In the fridge it will keep for 2 days.

Milk Chocolate Cardamom Cruffins
Makes 12

1 batch of cheats croissant dough

Cardamom Pastry Cream

300ml whole milk

100g caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla bean paste

Seeds from 6 cardamom pods, finely ground

25g cornflour

4 large egg yolks

30g unsalted butter, diced

Milk Chocolate Ganache

75g milk chocolate, finely chopped

100ml double cream

Orange Sugar

100g caster sugar

1 orange

To make a classically shaped cruffin you would use an American pan that is known as a popover pan (popovers are an American batter-based dish, like a sweet Yorkshire pudding). These pans are similar to muffin pans, but they are deeper so create a taller cruffin. If you happen to have one of these, then by all means, use it. I don’t own one and didn’t want to add yet another pan to my ever-expanding array of bakeware, so made do with a regular muffin pan. Yes, this meant my cruffins look a little more squat, but they’re equally delicious.

To make the pastry cream add the milk, half of the sugar, vanilla and cardamom to a saucepan and place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, whisk together the remaining sugar, cornflour and egg yolks, whisking until the mixture is smooth. When the milk mixture has come to a simmer, slowly pour the milk over the yolk mixture, whisking as you pour to prevent the yolks from scrambling. Pour the custard back into the pan and place back over medium heat. Whisk constantly until the custard has thickened and is bubbling. Cook for a further minute to ensure the starch is fully cooked out. Scrape the pastry cream into a bowl and mix through the butter, stirring until the custard is smooth and lump free. Press a sheet of clingfilm onto the surface of the custard, to prevent a skin from forming, and refrigerate until fully cooled. The pastry cream can be made a couple of days ahead of time.

For the ganache, add the chocolate to a small bowl and set aside. Add the cream to a small saucepan and place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Pour the cream over the chocolate and set aside for a couple of minutes before stirring to form and smooth and silky ganache. Set aside until needed.

To make the cruffins, cut the croissant dough in half and work with one piece of dough at a time. Roll out the dough into a 28x32cm rectangle on a lightly floured work surface. Use a sharp knife to trim the edges, to neaten up the shape, and then cut the pastry into two rectangles that will be roughly 16x28cm. Cut each rectangle into 6 smaller strips (these will be 16x4.5cm). Place these strips on a parchment-lined baking tray and refrigerate whilst you repeat this process with the second piece of dough. You should end up with a total of 24 strips.

Lightly grease a 12-hole muffin tray, and set aside. Remove the pastry strips from the fridge. To assemble the cruffins, we need to roll up two strips to form each individual cruffin. To do this, place one strip atop a second, offsetting the top piece by 3cm, and roll them up together. Visualising this can be tricky (about as tricky as it is to describe it), so the image above and the video below should help significantly. Once rolled up, you need to gently stretch the two ends and tuck them underneath the cruffin. The reason for this style of shaping, instead of just rolling up one long strip, is that it helps to create that classic look you get with cruffins. The final part of the shaping is to lightly flour the handle of a wooden spoon and press this down into the middle of the cruffin. This helps ensure a nice domed finish to the baked cruffins, and stops the centre of the spiral poking up as the cruffins proof and then bake. Place the shaped cruffins into the prepared muffin pan and lightly cover with clingfilm. Set aside to proof for about 1-2 hours or until the cruffins have doubled in size and you can see some separation in the layers.

Whilst the cruffins are proofing preheat the oven to 210ºC (190ºC Fan). Bake the cruffins for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Whilst baking, prepare the orange sugar. Zest an orange into the sugar and use your hands to rub the zest into the sugar until it is fragrant and looks a little like wet sand. Once the cruffins are baked, allow them to cool for a minute before carefully lifting them from the pan and rolling in the orange sugar. Doing this while the cruffins are hot enables the sugar to stick to the pastry. Once coated in sugar, set on a wire rack to cool completely.

To add the fillings scrape the ganache into a piping bag, ideally fitted with a Bismarck tip. This style of piping tip was designed for doughnuts and has a long thin tube which is perfect for filling the middle of doughnuts without adding a large hole. Push the piping tip into the middle of the cruffins and pipe a small amount of ganache into each one. Remove the pastry cream from the fridge and beat to loosen. Add the cream to a piping bag, once again fitted with a Bismarck tip, and fill the cruffins with pastry cream. You want to add as much of the pastry cream as you can, so, like filling a doughnut, fill until the cream starts to pop out of the top of the cruffin.

You can decorate as you wish, I went for something simple and just added a large chocolate disc to the top of each cruffin.

Once assembled, these are best on the day they are made.