Autumn Recipes: Ham and Cheese Croissants

Hello! I've decided to do a series of recipes to celebrate this season. Most of them are going to be pretty simple, and all of them are use at least a bit of what I learned in pastry school.

This recipe is something the bakery I did my externship at made that was very popular. They made it with homemade croissant dough that was used for all of the croissant products, but that's incredibly time consuming considering that you need to fold in all of the butter by hand. If you prefer to use handmade puff pastry that works too, but I used store bought dough which is actually just fine.

Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Organic Chocolate.

This is currently my favorite baking recipe and these are my all-time favorite cookies. They're so soft and rich and they bake so perfectly without their size being affected. These are great because instead of a bag of chocolate chips you can go to the store and choose your favorite chocolate bar. This makes the recipe very easy to alter to suit your tastes. The first time I made these I used a plain bar of Newman's Own dark chocolate that was 65% cacao, this time I'm using something a little lighter. The chocolate I used for this batch is from a brand called Dagoba. If you are looking for a fair-trade company DO NOT buy from this brand, everything seemed to check out at the store, but when I did some digging online I found out that Dagoba is actually owned by Hershey's. The quality is worlds better from Hershey's usual products, but I do not agree with Hershey's atrocious moral standards and I will not be purchasing this chocolate again. Anyway, the bar I picked is 59% cacao and has a secondary flavor of lavender and blueberries. I love the use of lavender in sweets (don't knock it until you've tried it), and I don't really see how you could go wrong with blueberries, honestly. You can use any flavor of chocolate, though. As long as it has 55-75% cacao it should bake just fine and is just a matter of taste.

Buttery Brown Snickerdoodle Recipe (Super Image Heavy)

It's time to put the "sugar" in Lunar Sugar! Today I felt like making some cookies, but I never like to follow a recipe exactly. I searched for a sugar cookie recipe that was already a little different and turned it into a snickerdoodle recipe! If you don't already know, most snickerdoodles are just sugar cookies covered in cinnamon sugar. These are a little different as the original recipe was brown sugar based. I think they turned out great, so here's my altered recipe! The original is here.