Ok, so my sister sent me Williams-Sonoma frozen croissants for Christmas. They arrived a couple of weeks ago and have been languishing in the freezer, with the plan being to serve some of them as the bread entry with our makeshift Christmas dinner. Our friend Toni was coming for dinner, finding herself kidless and working that day until 7 p.m. I had to work in the afternoon, and also was to get off at 7, at which point I’d come home and cook us all pasta for dinner.
Prior to leaving, I got the croissants, the pound cake, the fruit topping for the pound cake, some chicken and some other odds and ends out of the freezer to thaw while I was gone.
I get home at 7:20, and open the croissants. Now, somehow, it had escaped my notice that these were unbaked frozen dough. That’s fine — it’s pretty cool, actually –except now I finally read the directions. And I discover that they’re supposed to rise for 9 hours. And I have no idea at what point they progressed from “thawing” to “rising” — or if they’ve even made that transition yet, and, now that I think of it, I can’t even remember what frickin time I took them out of the freezer!
Drop 14 and punt to plan B — garlic bread with dinner. And on the theory that when I get up early tomorrow morning it will have been 9-hours-ish, I’ll bake them first thing.
Well, things didn’t work out exactly that way. First of all, Toni was here until one a.m. Then we stayed up ourselves till nearly three. Then I couldn’t sleep for some reason — rare for me but there you go — so by the time I finally got up today, it was about eleven. I go out to the kitchen and the croissants are HUGE. Just MOUNTAINOUS. They form one solid piece of articulated dough from one end of a 13×9 cookie sheet to the other, and are hanging a little bit off one edge.
I thought, you know what? What the hell. Cook’em anyway. I patted them down a little bit — just enough to release the more gargantuan of the bubbles, and popped the whole tray into the oven and cooked as directed. And we got lucky — we wound up with the croissant equivalent of monkey bread — golden brown, had to be pulled apart in chunks to be eaten, and absolutely delicious. And I got my Christmas lesson in the wisdom of reading directions.
