Baking Bouchon - Recipe 66: Pains aux Raisins

Despite its pretentious name, these are raisin croissants.  If I hadn't committed to making everything in this book, I would not have made these.  Must we rehash my dislike of raisins?  Let's not.

The croissant dough here is the same as traditional and chocolate croissants.  You actually use half a batch of croissant dough to make these ten pastries.  The dough gets rolled out and spread with a thin layer of pastry cream which I whipped up the day before.  Having made the pastry cream a half dozen times now, I'm finally getting the hang of it and this was best best batch yet.  On top of the pastry cream goes a boatload of raisins....

Sigh...

Ugh...

I used golden raisins because that's what we had in the house and they are slightly less repulsive than purple raisins.  The only redeeming quality about these raisins is that they are soaked in a rum simple syrup.  Rum makes them slightly less offensive.

All of that gets rolled up and sliced into individual portions - kind of like a cinnamon roll.  The rolls get brushed with egg wash and proofed for a couple of hours.

These baked up light and golden and quite pretty.  I ate a bite of one to tell you that I did.  It wasn't terrible, but I didn't eat any more.  CA ate them for breakfast and liked them, but even he admitted this wasn't his favorite of the croissant quad.

I sent most of these away.   The photo below reflects how my kitchen counter typically looks on Sunday nights as I'm sorting baked goods into keep and give away containers for two workplaces.  Don't you wish you worked with us?

I'm so grateful there is one more croissant recipe to share with you so that we don't have to end on a shriveled up sour note.

Enjoy!
Julie