Daring Bakers - Danish Braid

Today, you will see Danish braid posts popping up like daisies in a field all over the blogosphere. It's not a case of ESP or mere coincidence - it's the June Daring bakers Challenge! This month's challenge is co-hosted by Kellypea and Ben. Once again, this one at first seemed like a mountain that I had never dreamed that I could conquer. I've never made a laminated dough before, and if I had ever been asked to make Danish, I would have asked for help from Mr Pampas in the freezer section of my supermarket. I also read with dread some of the mishaps that befell other Daring Bakers this month, and doubted that I could do this. Ha, ha! Proved wrong again. The results surpassed my expectations, and I ended up with two Danish braids that I am proud of. Here is a photo of my dough after being cut in half, which shows the wonderful layers that I never noticed during the rolling process (because the end of the dough are rolled completely flat):

My dough was made by hand, as I managed to entangle the dough hooks on my mixer and I now can't untangle them. (Although courtesy of a department store gift voucher awarded to me by my work, I now have a brand spanking new Kitchenaid sitting in a box in my spare room, just waiting to be unleashed. I will need it, as beating the cold butter for this challenge finished off the beaters of my old standmixer, which were already battered from the cheesecake pops.)

I made two braids - one was apricot with vanilla pastry cream, and the other was apple and almond filling. The vanilla pastry cream recipe that I used is here, and the almond filling recipe is here. You need to use this almond filling while it is still warm, as it sets rather firmly - I had to reheat it before use because it was too firm to spread over the base of the Danish. I thought that I would enjoy the apricot custard filling the most, but funnily enough, it was the apple almond filling that won my vote. Here is my apricot custard Danish being braided:

I had to take out half of the apricots, as the filling was too much for the braid.

Here are the braids just before proofing - the one on the left is the apple almond braid which I made after I'd practised on the apricot custard braid, and as you can see, it is a lot neater:

Regardless, both braids baked up nicely - the apricot is on the left, and the apple is on the right. You can't tell that the apricot one was a little untidy before baking.

Below is a cross section of each Danish after it was cut to reveal the filling:

With the leftover dough, I made some mini Danish - the top one is apple and custard, the right hand one is apricot custard and the left one is almond:

I was really pleased with this challenge. The end result exceeded my expectations, and tasted delicious.

Thanks to Kellypea and Ben for their challenge selection this month. You can check out the recipe on either Kellypea's or Ben's site, and the Danish braids made by other Daring Bakers here.