Have you ever heard of a cronut? Sounds quite strange, doesn’t it? Well, it’s the combination of a doughnut and a croissant, created in 2013 by Dominique Ansel, a Parisian-born baker who now resides in New York. Cronuts have been described as nothing less than heavenly and the popularity of this delicate pastry has been on a steady increase ever since its birth. It tastes and looks like a doughnut, but it has the texture of a crispy, buttery croissant. Are you ready to start baking? Take a look at the recipe below.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 65ml warm water
• 60ml milk
• 6g dried yeast
• 125g all-purpose flour
• 150g diced butter (cold)
• 125g bread flour
• 30g castor sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt

Toppings:

• Bowl of vanilla sugar
• Bowl of icing sugar
• Pastry cream or vanilla custard
• 1 lemon

Recipe:  

1. Grab a bowl and whisk the warm water, milk and yeast together.
2. Use a food processor to combine the flour and diced butter until it resembles bread crumbs. Alternatively, you can can use your fingers to rub the flour and butter together. Now add the sugar and salt into the flour mixture.
3. Add all the dry ingredients into the milk mixture and stir until it starts to resemble dough. After a while you will need to use your hands to mix all the ingredients into dough.
4. Place the dough in a bowl, cover with clingfilm and let it rest for two hours.
5. Roll the dough out on a floured surface until it is 1cm thick. The shape you should be aiming for is a long rectangle. Fold the dough into thirds. Now repeat this process twice more. Cover the dough and place it in the fridge for another four hours or preferably overnight.
6. Remove the dough from the fridge. Using a rolling pin, roll once more, aiming for a thickness of half a centimeter. Use a doughnut cutter to shape the dough and place cronuts on a floured tray. Allow them to rise for one hour.
7. Pour two to three centimeters of oil into a hot pan (170 degrees celsius). Fry a few cronuts at a time for about two minutes on each side until they are golden brown. Place them on some kitchen towel to drain off any excess oil and immediately roll in vanilla sugar. Leave them to cool.
8. Inject the vanilla custard or pastry cream all around the ring of the cronut using a small nozzled piping bag.

Topping:

You can really go wild with your toppings. Put anything you like:  caramel, chocolate, sprinkles… the sky’s the limit. For a more traditional topping, mix icing sugar and lemon, then pour it over the cronut.

Tip! If you would like to avoid making your own pastry, you can use defrosted puff pastry.