Daring Bakers - Danish Braid

Slice of finished pastry
Originally uploaded by watchjennybake.

I had made the Danish Braid from Baking with Julia last January, so when the June Daring Bakers Challenge was announced, I felt ready to meet this challenge head on. This time the recipe comes from The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard, and can be found at one of the two host(ess)'s sites for this challenge - Kelly from Sass & Veracity, or Ben from What's Cooking?.

I have a history of procrastination for challenges, but this time I had a really good excuse - we moved during the month of June! This is the first time I have owned a home, so it is all very exciting, and this was only my second baking project in my new kitchen. I am a little more hesitant to get this one dirty, but seeing how it has been cleaned successfully several times now, maybe I'll get over it.

I did not start the dough until 10:30 last night or so, which was a MISTAKE. After the dough comes together, you have to roll it out, fold it up, and let it chill again 4-5 times. Thank goodness some friends were online to talk to me until 2:30 this morning, or I might have had an entirely different end result.

To me the main difference with this dough compared to Julia's recipe is that this has orange and cardamom in it, and I really noticed it this morning after the dough had chilled its minimum five hours and I was rolling it out to make it into the braid.

Friday, I took the day off, and spent the morning picking blueberries at The Happy Berry in Six Mile, SC with some friends. I knew I wanted to use them somehow with this baking challenge, because seasonal local produce can't be beat! Down here in South Carolina we passed strawberries and rhubarb long ago, and are barreling down the path toward peaches at this point, but that means that blueberries are perfectly in season. I found a random blueberry filling recipe and cream cheese filling recipe online, but since that was after four and a half hours of sleep, I'm not sure I can find it again. Somewhere on the internet, but they proved sufficient. I deliberately undercooked the blueberry part, wanting to make sure we could still taste the freshness of the berry.

The biggest misstep I made in this recipe was the beurrage, or butter block, stage. After seeing so many entries today, I see that it should have been more of a spreadable texture. But if you start with cold butter, and only have a Sunbeam mixer, nothing cohesive was going to happen. So I actually ended up grating the butter, mixing it with the flour, and sprinkling it on the dough during the first roll out. I feel like that worked pretty well, and it never got too warm to work with nor did it poke out of the sides, but I wonder how the end result would have been different if I had done that part more accurately.

Now to figure out what to do with the other half of the dough - I've seen some great examples of bear claws and chocolate croissants, I need to try one of those!

Categories: Blueberries, Breakfast, Cardamom, Danish, Daring Bakers, Pastry