Cherry Half Pockets

Music-Alice in Chains-Greatest Hits

These guys are great. All those heavy angry guitar riffs really inspire me to make my pastries more beautiful and elegant. I wonder who Alice was and why she was in chains.

Feed my eyes, can you sew them shut?

Baking-Cherry Half Pockets with Apricot Glaze

So these delicious things are very delicious. The hardest part about making the pockets was the dough since the dough was laminated. I've never really made a laminated dough before so making the layers of butter was very interesting. Laminated is a funny word huh? when i think of a laminated dough i think of rolling out the dough really thin and putting it through a laminating machine.that way the dough stays nice and shiny forever. Anyway the type of laminated dough i used was Danish Dough. Similar to Croissant dough but with eggs in the dough. To make this beautiful dough I mixed these ingredients together

1)     181 g Bread Flour

2)     20.6 g Sugar

3)     2.8 Instant dry yeast

4)     2.8 g Salt

5)     17g Butter

6)     36.9 g Eggs

7)     84 ml Milk

 then when the dough was non-sticky enough I put it out to a work surface and kneaded it. Then covered and let it rest for about 2 hours.

Afterward Molly Smith AKA Brunette Baking Babe AKA Triple B came and helped me out on making this dough laminated. To do this I got one and a half sticks of cold butter, put them between two sheets of wax paper and pounded/rolled it out into a medium sized rectangle (approx 12 x 16 inches). I pounded it out on a cookie sheet that had been refrigerated so the butter wouldn’t melt on me. This sheet of butter is now going to be called the roll-in cause that’s what the Culinary Institute of America refers to it as. Anyway I rolled out the dough to a rectangle a bit larger than the roll-in and placed the roll in on top of the dough. I then folded the dough in half and then rolled it out again back to its original size, that way the roll-in is inbetween the dough. Them I proceeded to administer a four-fold to the dough, refrigerated for a bit, administered a threefold, refrigerated for a bit, and finally one last three fold. So the three fold I talked about before, a fourfold is kinda the same expect the dough is folded 3 times instead of twice to make four layers. Anyway after all these folds your dough is laminated! Refrigerate again for a bit to make sure butter does not melt 

Rolling out the dough for the Roll-in

Administering one of the folds!

Dough after one of the trifolds or the four fold

After I prepared the cherry filling. To make cherry filling you first combine  14 g of tapioca starch and 28 g of cornstarch with as much water from 180 ml as you need to make a “slurry”. Then I combined:

1.      1g of nutmeg

2.      1 g of cinnamon

3.      1 tsp of lemon juice

4.      142 g of sugar

5.      ¼ tsp of salt

6.      Remaining water from the original 180 ml

In a sauce pan and waited for it to boil stirring constantly. After bringing to a boil add the starch slurry and then bring that to a boil stirring constantly. Then I added like 2 lbs of cherries or something like that. Just a lot of cherries and make sure they are pitted and what not. After the cherries have been in there for a bit and they are nice and gooey add in 2 tsp of butter and let that melt and mix. Then wait for it too cool off.

Cherry filling!

After I took the dough out of the fridge and rolled it out into approximately a 12 x 16 in rectangle and cut it into 12 pieces. Brushed lightly with egg wash and dabble some cherry goodness in the middle of each piece. Fold one end of each piece over to cover the filling and press on the edges to seal. Here John Evangelista helped out with the cherry filling filling. Brush each folded piece with egg wash again and then bake for 17 minutes at 375.

UNBAKED

UNBAKED

Then when its bake prepare an apricot glaze by mixing 9 oz of apricot jam with 6 oz of water and 9 more oz of corn syrup. Bring that to a boil and brush it on the baked pockets while they are still hot!

Holy Cherry Checkers Batman those look delectable!