Croissants, glorious croissants - Part 1

So, I'm going to be a snob for a moment...baking from French recipes and by that I mean recipes written in French is so much more awesome than the plain english ones, especially when baking things like croissants. I bought a fantastic patisserie book when I was in Belgium at the beginning of the year and this is my first dip into it.

Let me tell you my story with croissants. I've never thought about making croissants until a couple of weeks ago. I just didn't think it was possible to be honest. I've always imagined it to be one of those gourmet patisserie things that only bakers with millions of years of experience and a degree in culinary arts should attempt, definitely not to be attempted at home, and then...

[I have to backtrack a little bit here quickly - my delightful boyfriend is gluten intolerant and so I've been experimenting with leaving the realms of gluten and well known cake flours for a variety of little known flours (well, little known to me at least) such as: potato flour, rice flour, tapioca flour, corn flour, soy flour, quinoa etc.]

It's quite daunting, but I'm always up for a challenge and so am slowly embracing them. So, as I was baking the other night, I started wondering about puff pastry, because there is no such gluten free substance to be found, so I started pondering how hard it would be to make and so I started research.
It turns out firstly, that it does not look so hard to make, once you've gotten the hang of the techniques and the folding and making layers with the butter and pastry, and to my delight as I was investigating this, I stumbled across a recipe for croissants and to my disbelief it looked feasible!

So, here I am, about to start my first batch of croissants! I decided to start with gluten-filled croissants, so as to get the hang of the techniques and a feel for consistencies and then I'll move on to the gluten-free croissants, something that my delightful boyfriend (db) will be particularly excited about. :)