If you are not a morning person, these Easy 3-Ingredient Chocolate Croissants will be a good enough reason to get you out of bed. Soft and pillowy on the inside, golden on the outside, these really are a breakfast of dreams.
I have always been a croissant person. In fact, it is difficult not to be one when you grow up in Italy. Our version of croissants are called brioches and come in all shapes and forms, and with sooo many fillings, from crème pat to chocolate, from apricot jam to marmalade, I am sure I have still got to sample many Italian croissants. We normally grab them in the morning at a café, dipping them into our espresso or cappuccino. Similarly, every time I am in France, I long for those flaky and buttery croissants you can get at bakeries. So yeah, you get the gist, I am a croissant lover.
However, it turns out that making croissant is actually quite hard. The traditional croissant recipe calls for a lot of butter, some infinite amount of patience and elbow grease to make all those flaky layers and hours of time. I know that with quarantine we all got a lot of time in our hands, but I am not that desperate yet. Still, I have always wanted to be able to make my own pastry. So I had to find a way around and an easy pastry recipe.
And then it hit me, why not using my best friend, aka store-bought puff pastry to make croissants? After all, I would still be using regular pastry... Just not made by me. It’s cheeky really, but it turned out so so well. These are the perfect treat or breakfast for anyone: from busy parents, to beginners in the kitchens, to people who are trying to make great food on a budget and with pantry staples. I mean, what’s better than a 3-ingedient recipe that comes together in under 30 minutes? Not many things, if you ask me.
Now, a little technical note on how to make these beauties:
I made four medium-size croissants to make them look and feel like the Italian and French croissants I am used to buy and devour. In order to achieve this result, you will need to unroll the puff pastry horizontally and cut it vertically in half. The cut each half diagonally, creating 4 triangles. It sounds complicated, so use the image above as reference. It actually is really easy once you see it. At that point, add two tablespoons of chocolate chunks in the middle of each triangle, leaving about 1 ½ cm between the filling and the edges. Then carefully, wrap the wider end a few times until you get to the opposite pointy end. That really is the most difficult bit (and it is still very easy) as you want to make sure that you are wrapping the croissants quite tightly and avoid getting all the chocolate to escape from the sides. Once it’s rolled up, you will need to pinch the ends to seal them and make sure chocolate won’t come out of it and curve them slightly to give them the distinctive bendy shape croissants always have. And then you are done.
When making these croissants, there are a few things you can do differently to accommodate how many mouths you have to feed and what pantry ingredients you have got around:
Quantity: as I said, I made 4 croissants, but you can easily make 8. Just cut the two halves of the pastry sheet in 4 triangles and then cut each triangle diagonally to make 8 croissants. In theory you can even get 16 croissants by cutting each square into fours, but at that point they would be really small and with basically no filling at all.
Chocolate: I used a bar of dark chocolate which I cut up into very fine chunks. You can do the same with milk chocolate (probably better for kids) or simply chocolate chips (which would make this easy recipe even easier).
Egg: Before baking, I lightly beat an egg and brush it on the croissants. That will help make the surface crispy and golden. But if you don’t have eggs, brushing melted butter, margarine or even olive oil will deliver a similar result.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can do what I did and turn these croissants into perfect Italian brioches by sprinkling them with cocoa powder and powdered sugar. At that point, they will look exactly like the croissants you can buy at Italian cafés and you will have fully earned your chef hat. Just saying.
Ingredients:
Makes 4 large croissants 1 puff pastry sheet 80 gr dark chocolate 1 egg
Optional extras:
1 tbsp powdered sugar
1 tbsp cocoa powder
Method:
Preheat the oven at 180°C.
Roll the puff pastry sheet horizontally and cut it in half vertically. Now cut each half diagonally, creating 4 triangles (see the second picture of this article for reference).
Finely cut the chocolate into small chunks and place two tablespoons (or 20 gr) of chocolate at the centre of each triangle, keeping about 1-1 ½ cm distance between the filling and the edges of the triangle.
Starting from the wider end, tightly roll the triangle up, until you get your croissants. Pinch the sides to seal them and prevent the chocolate from exiting though there and slightly bend your croissants into a U-shape.
the croissants on a baking try lined with baking paper and lightly brush them with a beaten egg.
Bake for about 22 mins or until nice and golden.
Once they have cooled down, you can put a tablespoon of powdered sugar through a fine sieve and sprinkle it all over the croissants. Repeat the process with 1 tbsp of cocoa powder. This is totally optional but oh so recommended.
These croissants can be stored for 2 to 3 days. They can also be frozen for 2 months.
Enjoy!
Did you try this recipe? How did it go? We would love to hear from you! Let us know by leaving a comment below! Xx