Butter Croissant Rolls

A while back I came across a blog where the lady was making butter croissant rolls from the book, Standard Baking Co. Pastries.  For a few days, I resisted and then I could stand it no longer so I ordered the book. I figured if I was going to go to the trouble of making them, I would use the good Kerrygold Butter too.

Since we were having turkey and dressing yesterday, that was when I was going to have our butter croissant rolls. Having read how long they take to make, I started the process on Saturday.

Yes, it’s a lot of butter but just keep reading.  The dough has to be “laminated”, rolled, chilled, rolled, chilled, placed in the freezer if not using til tomorrow, removed from the freezer and placed in the fridge overnight.

Then, when it’s almost time to bake the rolls, the dough has to be rolled out and cut into wedges.

Then the wedges are shaped into rolls and left to rise for a couple of hours.

This is the second batch, which means . . there was a first batch. A dozen rolls in all. They are so delicious but they have to be so unhealthy with all that butter, but really . . there wasn’t that much butter . . keep reading!

I don’t know how well you can see it in the picture but there were layers and layers of buttery, flaky rolls . . absolutely delicious! I’m sure I will make these again but just not real often.

Now . . here’s the disaster part. There is a lot of butter in there and they warn you about letting the dough rise where it’s too warm because you don’t want the butter to melt. I put the rolls in the bedroom to rise because it was cooler in there. The kitchen was warm because the turkey was baking.

Once the turkey was finished, I raised the oven temp up to 430º, as instructed, but left the rack in the oven lower than it probably should have been and may have put the rolls in the oven before the temp reached 430º.

Worse, I had the rolls baking on a flat cookie sheet. All the butter melted, ran off the edges of the pan, landed on the bottom of the oven and . . SMOKE!  Oh, my! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much buttery, greasy smelling smoke as I saw in the kitchen and in the living room and in the dining room. We had all the windows open and decided to open the doors. That’s when Miss Hattie decided she should come and investigate. NO!  Not smoke AND a live chicken in the house. I figured if Speck saw her in the house, he’d take out after her and we might never see him again.

I took a spatula and some paper towels, turned the oven off, tried to poke the paper towels around on the bottom of the oven with the spatula to clean up the melted butter and I did manage to finish cooking the first batch of rolls.  The second batch got moved from the flat cookie sheet to a cake pan with sides, I made sure the oven was at 430º before putting the rolls in the oven, and I moved the rack up a bit. Some of the butter melted out of them but not much and it was all contained in the pan and not dropping into the oven.

What a mess. The oven is ok to use but it does need to be cleaned. I think I’ll wait til towards the end of the week when it’s supposed to be cold and let the heat from the cleaning oven help heat the house.

The rolls were truly delicious and my near disaster was no fault of the recipe .. but it’s a mistake I definitely will not make again.

There are other recipes in the book I want to try but it will probably be after Christmas before I get around to that.