Strawberry Danish Pastry

Do you see the flakiness of the dough, the creamy filling, the baked strawberries inside? I can almost taste it just by looking at the pictures and wish we could all have it for breakfast every week.

The quick danish dough that I use is a miracle in itself, a recipe from Beatriz Ojakangas who wrote quite a few books and specializes in Scandinavian baking; and despite all her credits as a baker and author, I will advocate this single quick danish pastry recipe as one of the best things to ever appear in my baking universe. It's gold.

And finally, I love fresh strawberries, but I'm not particularly fond of baked ones. Or so I thought.

Because then this filling came to be - with almond cream, cream cheese, and lime zest - it entered the intricate pattern of this braid, baked till it puffed and the strawberries softened, got a tingle from the lime glaze, and suddenly boom!

Baked strawberries are at the top, first in the line. They sure earned it, with this recipe and with the Brown Sugar Strawberry Crisp one too.

Words elude me when I try to explain how incredibly amazing and delicious this strawberry danish braid is.

Danish pastry dough recipe

If you love pastries as much as I do you'll go nuts about this quick danish dough recipe.

Though quick is a stretch probably in this tech time when we have instant access to so many things, this is the fastest way you can make it while still getting great results.

If you ever made a danish dough from scratch, you know exactly what I'm talking about. With this recipe, the first part is made in the food processor, so there's no more making a butter block, waiting for it to be the perfect temperature and then adding it to the dough rectangle.

Steps for the dough

1. You simply mix part of the dough ingredients together with the butter in the food processor. The crucial step is to leave the butter pieces the size of kidney beans (image 1). This is very important to achieve flakiness in the end.
2. The mixture from above is mixed with the rest of the ingredients which include the activated yeast (image 2).
   It's a very rough dough (image below, bottom) at first, very. You might think you need to knead it more, but you don't. You wrap it and it goes into the refrigerator like this for several hours.
3. Then comes the folding, or lamination. This is what makes it flaky. Each fold of the dough onto itself makes another layer of flakiness. This is the way croissants are made. The refrigeration time is essential for the dough to relax so you can roll it and fold it easily, and especially important when you have doughs with yeast.
4. It is folded a total of 3 times, with resting periods in between. The dough is rolled into a rectangle, short side parallels to the counter, and a third is folded from the bottom up and the other third from the top down. You give it a quarter turn to your right and that way you have like a flyer folded in three parts. That's a complete fold.
5. Below you can see how rough the dough with 1 fold (image 3) and how much smoother it is after 3 folds (image 4). You can see how the dough comes together with each fold and becomes less rustic and rough.

The cheese filling

I choose to use fresh strawberries with almond cream (or frangipane as it's also called) and limes.

They are incredibly good together! The creamy almond is soft and a very traditional filling. The strawberries add sweetness and freshness, and the limes add a tang that balances the butter and sugar perfectly.

It's such an amazing synergy of flavors I was completely caught off guard when I took the first bite. I wasn't expecting it to be so good.

Making the braid

When the dough is laminated and ready to be used, it is rolled into a large wide rectangle.

It's important to have enough dough were to make the cuts and then fold each strip to the other side, covering most of the filling, making a criss-cross pattern. If the strips are too short, they will puff and open during baking and the filling will be too exposed. This will make it less creamy as it will be exposed to direct heat.

My top tips

• Pastry dough: make sure you process the butter until it's the size of kidney beans, not smaller. That makes a difference.
• Resting: the dough needs to rest in the refrigrator the hours stipulated so that it can bake and puff as it should.
• Glaze: you can use lemon or another citrus, or even liquor. But lime is a great partner to the other flavors.
• Fillings: you can use a good berry jam, or another berry instead of strawberries, quince jam or just cream cheese with powdered sugar instead of the almond cream.