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This beautiful viennoisere was developed throughout a research and development class I had here at Pastry School in France! It was an amazing experience to be able to develop your own recipe and I have learnt to incredibly much over the past months.
So yeah, right now I mostly feel grateful for having had the possibility to come here, stop everything else in my life and truly dive into French Pâtisserie.
When I wrote down the steps for making this beauty I realised that, unless you’re a baker or you have previous experience making croissants, you will probably experience difficulties following my instructions.
For now, I will leave my recipe as it is but I promise that I will take the time to take detailed photos or even an explanatory video so that it’ll be easier for you to understand what you need to do.
But feel free to try the recipe anyways and don’t hesitate to shoot me a message on instagram or leave a comment below case you have any questions or troubles!! You can find me here on instagram.
Fleur de Provence Apricot Croissants
for six croissants/petals
Ingredients
Raised Puff Pastry
- 145 g milk
- 16 g fresh yeast
- 45 g sugar
- 5 g salt
- 150 g T45 flour
- 150 g T55 flour
- 60 g butter goes into the dough
- 150 g dry butter (mind. 82% fat)
Apricot and thyme pastry cream
- 70 g milk
- 3 g fresh thyme
- 70 g apricot purée
- 30 g eggyolks
- 30 g sugar
- 5 g custard powder or cornstarch
- 5 g flour
Roasted Apricots
- 150 g fresh apricots
- 13 g honey
- 20 g sugar
- 20 g butter
Apricot Confit
- 150 g apricot purée
- 20 g olive oil
- 5 g honey
- 23 g sugar
- 1,5 g Pectine NH
Sirup
- 52 g sugar
- 40 g water
Decoration
- 1 piece apricot
- some fresh thyme leaves
Instructions
Dough for Raised Puff Pastry
- Before starting this step, I highly recommend you read the section above that explains the process in detail to make sure you'll have a great result that you'll be happy with.
- As mentioned above, before starting, make sure that all of your ingredients are at the right temperature and in accordance with your room temperature.
- Add all the ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix at slow speed for 3 minutes.
- Increase the speed of your stand mixer to medium speed and mix for around 6-8 minutes. Verify your have a beautiful gluten network, the temperature of your dough should be around 24 degrees Celsius.
- Shape the dough into a ball, cover it and leave it raise at room temperature for 10 minutes.
- In the meantime prepare a rectangle made out of a guitar sheet or parchment paper of the size of 15x30 cm.
- Once the 10 minutes have passed, place your dough ball inside of your rectangle, remove all the gaps developed by flattening your ball into a rectangle using your rolling pin.
- After place your dough rectangle in the freezer for 15 minutes to stop the development of the yeast.
- Then place your dough in the refrigerator over night
- To finish for this day, take your 150 g of dry butter and place them in a square of 15x15 cm. Keep in refrigerator over night.
Preparation for Laminating your Puff Pastry
- Take your dough rectangle and your butter square out of the fridge.
- It's possible that you dough retracted, so take your rolling pin and make sure you also have dough in all of your edges and it has a size of 30x15 cm. Also be careful and try to roll out your dough regularly, it should have the same thickness everywhere.
- To make sure that your butter is no to cold, you can also use your rolling pin and gently roll over your butter square. That will make it slightly more soft.
- Once you did those steps, remove your dough from the plastic/parchment paper and place it on your previously floured workbench.
- Take out your butter and place it on the left side of your dough.
- Cut your dough in the middle, so that the left side of your dough has the butter on top and the right side is left empty.
- Then take the dough on the right side and place it on top of the butter. You should now have a dough - butter - dough sandwich.
Laminating your Puff Pastry
- Do some waves on top of your puff pastry using your rolling pin. Flip your dough and do the same on the other side.
- Now start rolling. Roll until you reach a length of approximately 60 cm. If your dough retracts and you cannot roll it anymore, place it in the freezer for 10 minutes or in the fridge for 20 minutes, then continue.Do your double fold and place the dough in the freezer for 10 minutes, then keep in the fridge for another 30 minutes.
- Take out your dough, cut open the dough on the sides where you folded the dough. Then turn your dough by a quarter.Do the same waves as you did before on both sides of the dough. Then start rolling out your Doug. This time it's enough if your dough is around 50 cm long.Do a single fold and place in the freezer for 10 minutes and then keep in the fridge.
Finishing your Puff Pastry
- After your dough had time to relax for at least an hour, take it out of the fridge.
- Again, cut open the dough on one side, where you had folded your dough.
- Now roll out your dough to around a size of 25 x 23 cm or until you reach a thickness of 0,9 cm.
- Again, place your dough in the freezer for 10 minutes until it's cool.
- Take it out again, and cut stripes of 1 x 23 cm. If your dough is around 25 cm, you will be able to cut out 12 of those stripes.
- Turn your stripes so that the side showing the lamination is facing you. Now place your stripes with this face showing upwards on top of your remaining dough. You can use water to make it stick better.Once you finished this, put your dough back into the freezer for around 10 minutes.
- You can now proceed and roll out your dough. Make sure that you only roll in the same way as your lamination. By rolling the other way you risk to destroy your beautiful layers you just created before.This means that you will get a relatively long dough of a width of around 12 cm. stop rolling when you reach a dough thickness of 0,5 cm.
- Place again in the freezer for 10 minutes, then put your dough into the fridge until you use it.
Apricot thyme pastry cream
- Heat your milk together with the thyme. Once its hot, switch off the heat and place cling film over your pot and let infuse for around 20 minutes.
- In the meantime, put the egg yolks in a bowl and add the sugar. Stir using a whisk until the color of your mixture get lighter.
- Then add the custard powder and flour and stir until homogeneous.
- Once the infusion is done, strain your milk to remove all the thyme. Since some of the milk evaporated, add some more milk until you have again 70 g.
- Then add your apricot purée to the milk and bring it to a simmer.
- Stir again your egg yolk, sugar, custard powder and flour mixture. Then add around a half of your hot milk/apricot purée mixture and stir well.
- Put this back into your pot to the remaining milk and purée. Heat again at low heat and bring slowly bring to a boil. It is important that you stir well using a whisk all the time. Your combination is going to thicken. Keep on cooking it for another 1-2 minutes once it thickened. It will get softer again and when this happens you know that you're doing everything right!
- Once your cooking is done, put your pastry cream in a bowl and cover it with cling film. Make sure the film touches the surface of your pastry cream. Then place it in the fridge until utilisation.
Roasted apricots
- Put your sugar and your honey into a casserole and caramelise it until it has a beautiful brown colour.
- In the meantime you can cut your apricots into small cubes.
- Then add your butter cut in small cubes to cook down the caramel. Be careful at this step and only add some of the butter at a time.
- Now you can place your apricot cubes into the casserole. Cook them until they're soft and slightly caramalised.
- Strain everything to remove the remaining caramel/butter and keep your apricots in a small bowl until usage.
Apricot and Olive Oil Confit
- Place the apricot purée, the olive oil and the honey in a casserole and start heating on low heat.
- Mix the sugar with the NH Pectin and add to the casserole. Stir using a whisk und increase the heat.
- Bring to a boil and boil for around half a minute.
- Place your confit in a bowl and let cool down at room temperature, then place it in the fridge. You can use it once the pectin did its job and gelified your confit.
Preparing your sirup
- Put the water and the sugar into a casserole. Heat until the sugar has entirely dissolved and the sirup boils.Remove from the heat and keep at room temperature or the fridge until usage.
Assembling and baking your viennoiserie
- Prepare a baking tray with parchment paper and place six petal-shaped moulds on top of it.
- Then take out your pastry cream and stir it using a whisk until its smooth. Put it into a piping bag if you have.
- Take out your puff pastry and cut stripes of 1,5 x 19 cm. Place them inside your mould, making sure that your layers are showing to the outside.
- Use your leftover dough to form the base of your petal. For this roll it out further until its around 0,4 cm thick. Cut out six petal forms. They should be smaller than your mould, so that you can place them inside your mould and the puff pastry you already placed inside.
- Now you can add the pastry cream inside each of your petals. It should be enough to fill your petals.
- If you want to bake the same day, let your petals rise for around 2-2,5 hours, ideally at a temperature of around 27-28 degrees celsius. If you want to bake them the next day, place your tray in the fridge, take it out the next day and let rise for 2-2,5 hours.
- Once your croissants have risen, bake them in a preheated oven at 160 degrees celsius (ventilating oven) for 12 minutes.
- Remove the tray from the oven and remove the moulds. Place your tray back inside the oven and bake for another 3-4 minutes until they're golden.
- Remove from the oven and apply the sirup on the puff pastry using a brush.Then, place them again in the oven for 1-2 minutes.
- Take them out and let them cool down. During this time, the pastry cream will sink down, so that there will be space to add the roasted apricots and the apricot confit.
Finishing your Fleur de Provence
- When your petals have cooled down, place some of the roasted apricots inside of each one of them.
- Then put your apricot confit inside of a piping back and fill up your petals until the rim of the puff pastry.
- Now, cut out small pieces out of an apricot and place on top of your petals for decoration. Finish by adding some fresh thyme leaves.
