Cream Cheese Danishes / Pains au Chocolat

As if my recent foray into cream cheese danish pastry braids wasn't enough, I decided I had to tackle danish pastries themselves, just as I had done one other time back in March 2020. On this latest occasion, since I chose to go with the fancy Kerrygold Irish butter, it might have almost overwhelmed the dough, making the rolling and folding a bit of a challenge.

But the multi-layered laminated dough still turned out pretty darned awesome, even with notable flaws here and there, and it had absolutely no deleterious effect on the baked pastries that resulted. Oh my gosh, these cheese danishes were remarkable! They were an incredibly unwise lunch on the final Tuesday of June, with yet another also reheated after supper. I really liked the filling from a different recipe and substituted that for the one recommended by the danish pastry recipe author.

Oh, but the recipe makes plenty of dough for other forms of pastry, and on the final day of June I rolled out a bit more and formed it into chocolate croissants or, more precisely, pains au chocolat:

Yet again, we are talking about a wonderful pastry treat that feels like a special occasion out-of-the-ordinary creation!

Those two previous endeavors used up only half of the laminated dough, so with a good portion of the sweet cream cheese filling still in the fridge, I made four more cream cheese danishes for dessert on Thursday, July 1st. Here is a shot of one of them:

I think you get a decent sense of the flaky layering that results from the way the dough is prepared, with that thin layer of chilled butter and all the folding and rerolling and rechilling and folding and rolling and so on. If you've got the time and the patience, I'd say this is well worth the effort!

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Laminated Pastry Dough was guided by "Danish Pastries," from Michelle Lettrich, who blogs at BrownEyedBaker.com. [Published 03 March 2020]

Cream Cheese Filling was based on "Blueberry Cream Cheese Pastry Braid", from Sally McKenney of Sally's Baking Addiction. [Published 16 February 2014]