Three Siblings Kitchen (TSK)

Calling all basic fall bitches!!!

This ones for you! The ones who rush to your local Starbucks to try the new fall drinks on the day they are released! While I am more of an apple girl myself, I do also enjoy a good pumpkin spice latte. Bonus points for fun names like Pumpkin Spice Lawsuit (at Five Watt Coffee) or for fun twists like a dirty chai pumpkin latte from that mom talked about for days!. I highly encourage you to try making your own syrups &/or coffee creamers of pumpkin flavor though too! Then you can tweak the spices and sweetness to your own tastes.

What I really wanted to share was my idea to shape croissant dough into little pumpkins by rolling scrap dough into a bun shape & wrapping butchers twine around it. My first 3 were a good start. I wanted to test cutting the string before baking in case it was too restricting but this resulted in a weird blob of croissant. One turned out a little wonky & the third was pretty nice. General consensus was that the string had to stay on through baking & be cut off after (I still fear missing pieces & someone accidently eating some string…)

Round two, I tied the strings a little looser, trying to be strategic in the way I layered them so that they wouldnt slide off or too far to the side though. Better! Because Im using scrap and tying each one probably a little different, they came out slightly different shapes but real pumpkins are different shapes so thats excusable & realistic. Ill take it.

After my first testers I had been thinking about what would be the stem of the pumpkin? When Ive seen other people do it, they use cinnamon sticks but I dont really like the idea of adding things that you are not meant to eat. I thought about a coffee bean (I’m thinking those chocolate covered espresso beans that are so hard to resist), its a little small but when I grabbed one, it kinda works. I also dont love the idea of adding garnishes that are not a flavor that is incorporated so rather than finding another “stem” I decided that I’d like to incorporate the coffee flavor..

Then it hit me, duh! Pumpkin spice latte. Make some pumpkin pastry cream, add in some espresso, fold in some whipped cream & pipe that into the finished croissant pumpkin. YUM!

I unfortunately never took a photo of it sliced in half but this is it, in all its pumpkin-y glory!

My first round wasn’t orange. I think it can be hard to get past the taste of food coloring so I like to avoid it (or avoid using too much), especially in something that requires a lot in order to get it to show well. So the first ones were just a typical brownish color of any croissant you’d see in a store or pastry case. Another test was to have regular dough underneath and to just do a thin layer of orange dough on the top. More time consuming for sure and once they proofed it was harder to avoid the plain croissant color from peaking out of the bottoms or even splitting the color open on the sides. Maybe one year I will figure out a way to dye the dough with something more natural and flavor. Ultimately I don’t think the food coloring is that bad, I just prefer to avoid it.

The general process:

Reserve all scrap, place back in mixer (ideally not too cold) with enough food coloring to get a vibrant color(it will still darken in the oven a little bit). Once fully incorporated, lay out on a sheet tray in an even sheet. Refrigerate overnight (this allows the color to set and will be less likely to dye everything it comes into contact with). The following day, scale all the dough into preferred size lumps and roll into balls. Cut one piece of butchers twine to the length needed and then use as a guide for the remainder. (I keep my arm at a 75 degree angle and wrap from just past my elbow to the space between my thumb and fingers. This way I can wrap 30 times and then cut once through all the pieces.) Then wrap the twine loosely around each pumpkin, tying a knot in the bottom. Make sure to place flat on the pan so they don’t tip over and the strings will hold their place. Once proofed its a little trickier to shift the strings (though still do-able). Then they bake similarly to other croissants but because they are dyed and we don’t want them to brown as much, we skip using egg wash. They get baked at a slightly lower temperature as well in order to avoid getting too dark. Once cooled out of the oven, cut the strings (I usually go from the top) and carefully unwrap each pumpkin. The strings usually come off nicely but you have to watch out for rips anyhow. I use a scissors to poke a hole into the bottom and make gaps in the lumps so the pumpkin pastry cream has enough space to fill in. Next, pipe in the filling. Unfortunately we lose the shine that egg wash would give but we brush with an apricot glaze now to make up for it. While still wet/sticky, place one large or two small coffee beans on top to create the stem look!

Many people asked how I got it into that shape, they probably thought it was much more complicated than it really is. It is probably the most ~home baker~ thing I have done in a professional environment. Years ago when I initially was thinking about doing this, I had wanted to find a way to create a metal spider shaped contraption. In theory, you would set the “spider” over a rolled bun, proof and bake it. After baking you would carefully take it off. It would have to be heavy enough that the push of the proofing and the push oven spring wouldn’t be able to lift it off in the process. It would also ideally be easily cleaned, either with soaking or just throwing into a dishwasher. Maybe someday I will figure out how to make this but until then I am still on the baker side with ideas but without the knowledge (and probably tools) to create such things to assist in said baking endeavors.

On that note, I will leave you with my favorite photo of the process.

Since I missed Halloween, these could also be passed off for Thanksgiving if you’re not the type to immediately jump to peppermint everything on November 1st.

Happy Fall!!