Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Pain au Chocolat


A rather non-authentic French pastry that's great for breakfast or dessert. I lost the recipe for this long ago, so I'm kind of approximating. It's pretty hard to screw up though. I'd say this baby merits 4 stars.

1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
3 Hershey chocolate bars broken along the lines (or whatever chocolate you have laying around. I've used chocolate chips in a pinch)
1 egg white, beaten
flour
butter for greasing the cookie sheet
powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease cookie sheet with butter (or line with parchment paper). Unfold puff pastry on lightly floured cutting board. Dust with flour. Roll out slightly with a rolling pin.

Cut puff pastry as follows (more or less..it got really complicated as I tried to write it out so I decided a diagram was probably preferable to my confusing instructions):

Each pastry piece should be about as wide as a piece of the broken chocolate bar is long.

Brush each piece with the beaten egg white and place a square of chocolate about 1/2 inch from the end of the pastry piece. Roll it up into a log, using your fingers to squish the end into kind of a seal. Leave the sides open. Place the log seal side down on the cookie sheet. Repeat with each pastry rectangle.

Brush tops of each log with egg white then pop them in the oven until the tops start browning. In my oven it's usually about 12 minutes. I'd say check on them at 10 and then just keep an eye on them.

Dust with powdered sugar and enjoy!

*I made this once with a macadamia nut chocolate bar and it was amazing. If I had more time tonight I would have added sliced almonds to the chocolate but I was running late. But I'm pretty sure it would have been the best thing I had ever tasted.

2 comments:

Kristi said...

Wow, that sounds really good! So are the puffed pastry things found in the freezer section or where?

TheMoncurs said...

yup, freezer section. Make sure it's puff pastry and not phyllo dough though. They are usually next to each other in similar packaging.