Chocolate Croissants (Pains Au Chocolat) (a step-by-step guide with .gifs)

Okay, so I’m continuing on from last week’s tutorial on croissant dough and shaping croissants to bring you two alternative uses for it!

This is a guide for shaping chocolate croissants, and of course, I had to bring cinnamon into this whole thing somewhere so I’ve also got a guide on shaping Cinnamon-Raisin Danish Swirls here.

The croissant dough is cut into four pieces, the instructions for this recipe only uses one of those pieces ( i.e. one quarter of the entire recipe), meaning you can make loads of different things from making just one batch of dough, yay!

You will need:

• 1 piece of croissant dough (i.e. 1/4 of the whole recipe); the step-by-step tutorial for the dough can be found here
• 1/2 cup (100 g) semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips or chopped chocolate

To shape the Chocolate Croissants (aka pains au chocolat)

1. Remove 1 piece of dough from the fridge, unwrap it and roll out on a lightly floured surface into a 18″ x 5″ rectangle
2. Cut the dough horizontally in half. Then cut the dough vertically into fourths, making 8 rectangles.
3. Sprinkle 1 tbsp of semisweet chocolate chips (or chopped chocolate) in a line down a short edge of each rectangle.
4. Starting at the short edge, roll up into logs.
5. Place seam side down onto a lined cookie tray, 2″ apart.

Bake:

Cover loosely with cling film and leave to rise in a cool place for around 2-3 hours ( if you’re making these the night before, you can actually shape them and leave them to rise in the fridge overnight instead).

Once ready to bake, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F (22o degrees C) . Brush the chocolate croissants with beaten egg using a pastry brush and put into the oven. Immediately lower the temperature to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C), and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) and bake for a further 8-10 minutes until well browned and puffy.

Let cool on a wire rack. Enjoy your 2 to I-literally-don’t-know-how-long-these-took-to-make-any-more day labour of love.