Pain au chocolat

I have warm memories of pain au chocolat, known as a chocolate croissant to most. My mom used to always buy them for me as a child from the local French bakery. Flaky crust, tender dough, and hidden deep in the folds of pastry was what I savored the most; chocolate. I used to gingerly eat around the edges saving the chocolate for last.




So it's an understatement to say that I was excited to make them. We began by enveloping margarine in dough. We used margarine instead of butter, since it has a higher melting temperature and would be easier to work with. I told Chef Maurice that margarine was against my religion.





We rolled the dough out, and added "turns" to it, meaning the dough is folded and rolled out several times. As with the puff pastry, this action creates many alternating layers of margarine and flour.



Next, the dough is rolled out, cut in half lengthwise and then each length of dough is cut into nine pieces. Each piece of dough is the width of a chocolate 'baton' or stick.



Each rectangle of dough is rolled up with two chocolate batons snuggly in the middle. They look like albino ho-hos if you ask me.



Even rolled up, you can still see the pretty layers.



The pain au chocolat took a lot of self control, but I managed to only eat one, and gave the other eight away!