I've come to realize once again, that being told to do something takes all of the fun out of it. This feeling of discouragement to baking culminated once again this past weekend, when I actually made puff pastry for the first time.
Personally, I love to bake. Over the course of the quarantine season, I baked all the time. I baked bread, pie, cake, cookies. I baked it all. However, when the time came around for me to bake something for this week's blog entry, I found myself dreading it. Why?, I thought to myself. You chose to do this because you wanted to, so why the sudden aversion? After some soul searching, I found the root of all of my motivation-related problems, school. More specifically, being forced to do this project for a grade. Baking by itself: super fun and relaxing. Baking with the added "bonus" of a 600-word blog post entry: not so fun. Once something negative is added on to something fun, whether it be an assignment or any other type of responsibility, it effectively ruins the whole experience. The useless thing about this dread was that I knew that I had to do it anyway, so there was really no point in fretting. It also still ended up being fun.
This week, I made actual puff pastry for the first time. Well… kind of. Saving the hardest puff pastry recipe for a bit later in the year, I made this “half-and-half” version of puff pastry, “rough-puff-pastry”. I got the recipe from here . Essentially, the difference between rough-puff and regular puff pastry is the difficulty, and the time it takes to make it. Rough-puff uses a lot less folding to create layers, and instead relies on mixing a lot more butter into the dough itself. While on the other hand, regular puff pastry spreads butter between layers of dough. Both use layers to create a crispy, flaky texture. With this rough-puff, I decided to make cheese straws from, this website .To split up the work to do the least in one day, I made the dough on Saturday, and made the cheese straws on Sunday.
Maybe this is the universe trying to make this story interesting, or maybe I just made some errors, but not everything went perfectly smooth this time around. The dough-making on Saturday went without a hitch, but the cheese straws process was a bit shaky. I got the cheese onto the dough, and got it into strips, and did the twists, all with no problems, but once it got into the oven, some problems arose. The time that they were supposed to bake for was 10 minutes, so I set a timer for ten minutes and went on my phone. However, after 5 minutes, I heard a sizzling sound penetrating my ears. I walked over to the oven, slightly perplexed, and opened it to find something horrible. The oil from the butter and the cheese had leaked out, and began effectively frying the straws. I was making this for the first time, so when something that wasn’t especially clarified in the recipe showed up, I started to freak out a bit. I took them out of the oven to examine a bit, and decided to drain the oil, flip them over, and just let them fry on the other side.
In the end, they turned out fine, just not exactly how I expected. I’m also glad that I didn’t just give in to my uninterest, and procrastinate the project to a later date, because even with its hiccups I still really enjoyed making them
Here are the images:
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