Cronuts at home

One of the trendy pastry things making the round is the Cronut, which is croissant dough that has been fried and glazed like a donut. I've never had the original (which was invented by Dominique Ansel in New York... I have heard there are two hour waits in line to get one), but I have made both croissants and donuts from scratch. When my stepson Cordell asked me to "bake something that sounds fun to you" in lieu of a cake for his birthday, I decided I had to give them a try. I deliberately avoided searching out other people's recipes on the internet, since I wanted to see if I could work out how to do it myself.



The base is the croissant dough recipe from Rose Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible, although made entirely with King Arthur UBAP flour instead of the partial whole-wheat called for in the recipe, and unsalted Kerrygold butter incorporated into the laminated dough. This was rolled out to about a quarter inch thick, cut with our no-waste hexagonal biscuit cutter, and the holes were punched out with a large pastry tube tip. I put them on little squares of waxed paper so they could be handled without deflating, and let the dough rise for about an hour before I started frying.



We have a little fry-baby deep fryer. I put a couple inches of peanut oil in there (The Dominique Ansel page linked above mentions that they use grapeseed oil, but I didn't have that on hand) and let it heat up to around 325. Taking the basket out, I used the waxed paper to invert the dough onto the bottom of the basket, then lowered it into the oil. (If the waxed paper sticks, it will detach from the dough pretty quickly once the oil hits it, so just fish it out with a pair of chopsticks.)

I fried them one at a time for 2 minutes, flipped them over with a chopstick, and fried them for 2 minutes more. This was sufficient to cook them completely through.



Once time was up, I lifted the basket out of the fryer and shook most of the oil, then tipped it out on a paper towel to drain a bit. Once it was cool enough to handle, I transferred it to a cooling rack, and drizzled some icing on it. The icing was made with about a cup of powdered sugar, several tablespoons of heavy cream, and a quarter teaspoon of homemade vanilla extract. Add more cream or sugar as needed to reach the desired consistency; it should drip thickly off a spoon, but not be either a paste or runny. If the cronut is still warm when iced, the icing will melt into it just beautifully.



Here's one cut with a serrated knife to show the wonderful layering these came out with. The outer layers were shatteringly crisp and crunchy, and the mixture of the incredibly rich butter-infused middle with the sweet vanilla icing was just amazing. The recipient had the best line when he tried the first one:

"Oh, so THIS is what sin tastes like." -- Cordell

If I were to do them again, I would definitely want to play around with the toppings some more. Rolling them in cinnamon sugar, Injecting some pastry cream with a bismarck tube (or slicing them crosswise and filling it like a sandwich), or making a chocolate ganache to top them with would all be great things to try.

Oh yummy. Those look so good. Bring them to a dessert exchange.

Chouxfly wrote:

"Oh, so THIS is what sin tastes like." -- Cordell

Love it!!

There is still room in next Sunday's dessert exchange should you want to experiment some more.

Cordell makes me want drop everything and make these now!

This is the hex biscuit cutter, by the way...