French baking class

Last weekend, I treated myself to a French baking class. The lesson was 3 hours and it focused on the French pastry, particularly croissant, paint au chocolat and pain au amande. These three desserts are all made out of the same dough. We made the pastry dough from scratch and folded and rolled it out many times so that there are 24 layers of butter and dough. If you look at my pictures below and at the flat white rectangle of rolled out dough, that actually has 24 layers! this is standard for a proper French croissant. If you are familiar with a "millefeuille" pastry, this is the same dough but folded to close to 1,600 layers! Imagine keeping count of that! Anyways, this class was really fun and interesting and I got to take home a large amount of goodies afterwards. Pictures are below:

 My first-ever croissant:

 Dough that has 24 layers of dough and butter. Being sliced to make "pains au chocolat" (chocolate croissants):

Pains amandes that I made (with sugary almond paste and sliced almonds)

 In the oven!

 Et voila:

 

A pain au amande baked to perfection:

 My creation that I got to eat!

 Bon appetit:

 Just a fraction of the amount of goodies we made! (Including cinnamon buns with the left over dough):

 Pains au chocolat:

 As this album is mostly about food, I thought I'd post a picture of a meal we enjoyed a few nights ago. Some friends an I decided it was time to step it up and have a real French wine and cheese evening. We bought artisan baguettes, wine that didn't cost the regular 1 euro (we splurged...5 euros) and five different cheeses (baked camembert, peppered cheddar, apple cheddar, brie and ashed goats cheese):