Milan for us was another quick stop. We spent one night and one morning there and thus I only took one food picture— that of my complimentary breakfast from the hotel. As you can probably guess from the photo, canned apricots + factory produced croissants didn’t exactly wake up my tastebuds. Nonetheless, I’m super glad I snapped this photo as it led me to recreate it freshly from scratch!

Duomo di Milano

Classic Croissants

Makes 8 full size croissants

Ingredients:

For the dough:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour (9 oz to be more precise)
• 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp water, cold
• 1/4 cup + 1 tbsp milk, cold
• 3 tbsp granulated sugar
• 1 tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 tsp instant yeast
• 1/2 tsp salt

For the butter layer:

• 1 stick Trader Joe’s unsalted butter, cold

For the egg wash:

• 1 large egg, beaten
• 1 tsp water

Directions:

I followed these instructions, but since I was only making half the dough there were a few changes to note, namely dimensions:

1. To make the butter layer, I only used 8 tbsp (as opposed to the 10 tbsp listed since 8 tbsp is conveniently 1 stick of butter). Since I used Trader Joe’s butter, the stick dimensions were perfect so that I just had to cut it in half lengthwise once and I’d end up with my butter square with only 1 “seam” to mend. I then pounded/rolled it out to a ~5″x5″ square.

Trader Joe’s butter (top) Land O Lakes’ butter (bottom)

1. For the dough layer, I rolled it out to ~7.5″ x 7.5″ square (well more ended up like a circle with a diameter of 7.5″ but it still worked).
2. To cut the triangles at the end, I first rolled the dough out lengthwise into a long rectangle slightly larger than 8″ x 16″. Using a pizza cutter, trimmed the sides of the dough so I had a clean rectangle measuring 8″ x 16″. Cut this in half lengthwise and widthwise, yielding four 4″ x 8″ rectangles. Cut each piece along their diagonals, yielding eight triangles. (At this point, I only rolled 4 dough triangles into full-sized croissants and divided the other 4 pieces to give 8 smaller croissants.)

Some baby croissants scattered amongst the “adults”

Honey Baked Apricots

Ingredients:

• 4 apricots
• 1 tsp honey

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Half apricots, removing pits. Spread a thin, even layer of honey across the cut surface and place cut side up in a baking dish. Bake for 8 minutes.
2. Flip apricot halves over and bake cut side face down for another 7 minutes. Apricots should be soft, but structure should not be compromised. Let cool before serving.
   

   Flaky, buttery goodness with soft, tangy apricot halves

   Thank you, Milan