Michael and I spent this past weekend making croissants for the first time. My birthday was on Sunday, so I figured that there would be no better time to request that we spend a full weekend popping in and out of the kitchen, preparing these delicious, buttery treats! We began by making the sponge on Friday night, and spent a chunk of saturday rolling, resting, and folding. On Sunday morning once the dough thawed from its overnight in the freezer, we got to work with the final rolling, cutting,  and forming of the croissants. We even made our own pain au chocolat by folding bits of chocolate into a few of the croissants!

Once we took our first bites of pain au chocolat, fresh from the oven and oozing with chocolate, our fear that perhaps we’d wasted an entire weekend tending to these croissants disappeared completely. Of course, they didn’t taste quite as good as the dozens of croissants we ate while we were in France a few summers ago, or our go-to croissants we pick up from Scratch on the weekends – but that didn’t matter one bit, they were our croissants and they were delicious. Though to be completely fair, five sticks of butter could make just about anything taste amazing, right?

Here’s the recipe we used from Frenchie’s featured in a recent issue of Food & Wine. We’re eager to start comparing and experimenting with other recipes… because we’ve gotten way too used to the idea of starting our mornings with warm croissants and apricot jam.

All photos taken by Meredith Perdue for Map & Menu.