Anguish at my Danish Pastries!

Yar, the bar was a little too high for a first attempt at Danish pastry, in fact for my first ever gluten free any pastry…

I think this is a great example of when just replacing the gluten products for gluten free alternatives DOESN’T work. I mean there were a few things that I wish I had known such as using cold but not fridge cold butter and perhaps not quite so much (it ran out whilst baking anyway, as you can see from the burning and crusty texture)

The ingredients for the pastry were:

500g strong white flour ( I used Doves farm bread flour - because, meh, what’s the difference?)

half a teaspoon of salt

375g of butter

1 x 7g sachet of fast action dried yeast

60g caster sugar

150ml of warm milk

2 beaten eggs.

I didnt get as far as doing the filling, you’ve seen the results of the pastry…

It all seemed to be going well, until I rolled the pastry out, it was quite dry and crumbly, but I persevered. Added the first lot of butter blobs, went OK, onto the next layer, oh my..

The cracks were showing but I put it into the fridge as per instruction, thinking it would harden up, ready to roll for the second time.

Nope it was pretty messy and started to stick to the rolling pin (head in hands emoji) I had one more chill and roll to do - was it worth it? Only one way to find out.

Yep still bad and very, very sticky. I made all the shapes suggested in my recipe book and considering how messy it was, I thought I made some recognisable shapes.

Butter everywhere in solid form and as a melted liquid, I may have stung my eyes when I opened the oven door. No not worth it!

I will do this again, but I need to find a gluten free danish pastry recipe, no doubt there’s a better one than this! Although you don’t see many ‘flaky’ pastry ready made bakes in the shops.. is that a sign?!