Kings (of the road) and Kouigns

 It's that time of year. Except it isn't. 

One of the highlights of my year is the Tour de France. It has everything - drama, a good long contest (also a fan of test cricket and this is rather like test cricket played over 21 days between 22 teams with multiple prizes on offer). ridiculous displays of endurance and bravery and, most importantly, the French countryside unrolling under the helicopters in all its varied majesty while the commentators tell us about the chateaux, reservoirs and wildlife.

Well; this year it's started 2 months later than intended, in a red Covid zone, and is heading all over France to culminate in Paris, another red zone. Not sure anyone's completely expecting it to run to the end - so the start was even more nervy than usual, and the rain came down in Nice for the first time in months, so it made for a crashy, somewhat scary stage. The senior guys in the peloton tried to calm everyone down, but one team made a break for it nevertheless, with the somewhat predictable result that their team leader faceplanted into a traffic sign halfway down the descent to the collective schadenfreude of the French commentary team...

ANYWAY. I digress. Just so happy that it's even started, despite the masks and the lack of crowds and the UK commentary team being based in Kent...

I wanted to make some French pastries. I knew what I wanted to make - Kouign-Amann. Buttery, sugary, completely indulgent Breton things in muffin tins. They sell them at one of the King's Cross market stalls and every couple of weeks I fall, and buy myself one for breakfast on a Friday.  I found a recipe... and resolutely ignored the fact that the Tour isn't going within hundreds of miles of Brittany this year.

The dough looked fine. I mixed it up in the stand mixer I bought at the beginning of All This

and put it into a container until it had doubled in size, and put that in the fridge to get a head start in the morning.  (Do feel free to laugh hollowly here.)

At around 4am (because why not), my brain woke me up and informed me I'd forgotten to put the salt into the mixture. 4 hours later I got up, opened the container and the whole lot went flub into a sticky mess at the bottom of the container.  So I chucked that, and started again. So much for late breakfast buns...

At that point, all my good intentions about blogging assiduously went out of the window. But if you've made puff pastry, it's similar - rolling-pin a block of butter into a sheet, fold the rolled pastry over it, refrigerate, repeat (4 times); except with these, you also roll sugar into the last two turns for even more indulgence.  Here are the little squares waiting to go into the muffin tin.

And this is where my second error came in. I have mini muffin tins which are deep; but my bun tins are the shallow ones you'd make mince pies in. Squidging the folded parcels into the shallower tin and then proving them for 40 mins led to a sort of sheet of Kouign-Amann (this is the "before" picture).

When I checked halfway through, they looked terrible.  Half of three of the buns had fallen to the floor of the oven and were sizzling away merrily there. However, at the end, some of them were quite passable...

And they taste right. Buttery, crunchy, crispy. I think even Paul Hollywood wouldn't say bad things about my lamination. Definitely one to repeat on a cold miserable winter day. But I'd get up earlier - with all the chilling and faffing and rising and cooking they took very nearly 5 hours... They freeze, though, I'm told, and heat up in the oven in a few minutes, so that's treat-type breakfasts sorted for a while...