I recently decided to make chocolate croissants at home. The previous day, I looked up the recipe and discovered that it takes 8 to 10 hours to complete. Many people had mentioned that baking croissants is a tiring and tedious task, and it’s better to just buy them from a bakery. But I wanted to prove myself as a baker, so I decided to go through with it.

I started early in the morning by making the dough and setting it aside to rest. I mixed flour, yeast, sugar, milk, and butter to create the dough, which needed to rest for about 2 hours. Up to this point, the process seemed easy enough, and I didn’t quite understand why people complained so much. Little did I know the doom that awaited me. While waiting for the dough to rise, I was scrolling through croissant recipe videos and found that it had taken a professional baker three years to master the art of making croissants. Being very competitive, I decided right then and there that I was going to beat this chef and make perfect croissants on my first try.

After the dough had enough time to rest, it was time to roll it out and place a pat of butter in the middle. I then folded the dough over the butter and chilled it for an hour. This was when things started to get tough. The dough was a sticky mess, unlike the smooth and well-kneaded dough in the recipe video. It tore apart like soft clay when I folded it over the butter. Eventually, the dough softened, and I was able to move on to the next step, which was chilling it. By this point, the process had already taken around 4 hours.

The next step was to create layers of butter and dough by folding the dough three times, making a total of six layers. Then, the dough had to chill for an hour before repeating the process. This had to be done two more times, creating a total of fifty-four layers of butter and dough. This took around three and a half hours, and I was struggling to keep the dough together.

When all the layers were finally done, I cut the dough and rolled it together with a piece of chocolate, since I was making chocolate croissants. I made around twelve rolls and had to let them rest again before finally baking them in the oven. As the croissants baked, their buttery aroma wafted through the house, spreading a warm and cozy feeling all around. When they came out, I was stunned. The croissants had risen perfectly, with browned and crisp layers on the outside, and buttery, tender layers on the inside. I immediately took one and opened it. Rich, creamy chocolate oozed out from the center. The croissant tasted amazing and was definitely worth all the effort and waiting time.

I took a lot of photos from several different angles. I had made croissants on my first try. And the best part was – the professional baker hadn’t!

Author: Adhira Magesh, 12 years old from Pune