Double Chocolate Pain au Chocolat

How to make pain au chocolat better? Add some white chocolate. Nom nom nom. This is the perfect, yummy, warming breakfast on a cold wintery morning. I'm actually thinking about making these for Christmas morning but it is highly likely that I will be exiled from the kitchen on Christmas eve, so maybe not. Also, my Christmas morning usually begins with a few Cadburys Heroes so it might be a bit early in the day for my Christmas chocolate overdose.

These take a bit of time and patience but the end result is totally worth it. It was a freezing, windy, cold, no chance am I going outside today, kinda day when I made these. I made the pastry from scratch but you could always just buy the ready to go puff pastry. Not gonna lie, I am pretty proud of the amount of layers of pastry I managed to achieve.

"Ogres have layers. Onions have layers" turns out, so do my pain au chocolat.

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INGREDIENTS

460g PLAIN FLOUR

270ml MILK

1 TSP DRY FAST ACTION YEAST

1 TSP SALT

2 HEAPED TSP SOFTENED UNSALTED BUTTER

4 TBSP CASTER SUGAR

160g UNSALTED BUTTER

1 EGG

50g MILK CHOCOLATE

50g WHITE CHOCOLATE

MAKES 6

Sift the flour into a bowl. Add the milk, yeast, salt, sugar and 2 heaped teaspoons of butter. Knead the mixture into a soft dough.
Place the dough into a lightly floured bowl, cover with cling film or a tea towel and leave for 45 minutes in a warm place. It should roughly double in size.
While the dough is proving, place the butter on a sheet of baking paper, fold over the paper and roll out the butter into a square roughly 15x15cm and pop it in the fridge.
Take your dough out of the bowl and place it onto a lightly floured surface. Then punch (yup literally punch) the air out of the dough.
Roll out your dough to form a large rectangle and add your square of butter to the centre. There should be about 4 fingers width from the edge of the butter to the edge of the dough.
This is where it gets a little bit complicated to explain so it might be easier to have a look at the pictures below to see what I mean. You want to fold the dough over the butter so that it ends up looking like an envelope by basically taking each corner and folding it over into the centre.
Next, roll out the dough into a rectangle. Have the shorter side of the rectangle facing you and fold the top half (the end furthest away from you) in about two thirds. Again sorry this is really tricky to explain so have a look at the pics below. Then fold the one third left, over the part that you just folded. Congrats if you are actually following what I am talking about.
Then turn the whole thing 90 degrees so that it ends up looking a bit like a book. Pop it in the fridge for 50 minutes.
After 50 minutes take the dough out and roll out the dough upwards. Don't roll both ways. Then you just repeat as before and fold the top two thirds towards you, and then fold the remaining third away from you, turn 90 degrees, and pop in the fridge for 50 mins. You need to repeat this folding, turning and popping in the fridge, another 2 times so you end up doing this 4 times total. Don't worry if you only do it 3 times, it just means you will have less layers.
Next roll the dough out into a large rectangle that is about 15cm by 25cm. Pop 2 squares of milk chocolate and 1 square of white chocolate on the upper edge of the rectangle. Then cut a large strip, the width of the 3 squares of chocolate (have a look at the pic) and the entire length of the shorter side of the rectangle. Then roll the dough to form a spiral with chocolate in the centre. Repeat until you have 6 pain au chocolate dough shapes.
Cover them in cling film and leave to prove for another 25 minutes. Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C fan, gas mark 5).
Brush the beaten egg over the dough and pop them on a baking paper covered baking tray. Cook for 25 to 30 minutes until they look golden brown.
Enjoy!