How to Make an Easy Homemade Cheese Danish

Well, bakers, you'll be delighted to know I'm finally doing a video for my Cheese Danish Recipe. This dough is easy to make, but it does involve a lot of steps. Believe me, the results are well worth it. So let's start out by making our dough. In a nice big bowl here, I'm going to add in my dry ingredients. I have some all-purpose flour. Now, this is a yeasted dough, but for this particular type of pastry, I like to use a flour that has less gluten, so all-purpose or plain is really ideal for this recipe. Lovely. Into this, we're going to add in a little bit of granulated sugar, salt, as always to add flavor, and then just a little bit away from the salt, I'm going to add in my yeast and give that a little mix. Lovely. The star of the show here, butter. So this dough is a lovely enriched dough, but it's similar, akin to a croissant, but the difference is that we're not folding in butter. We are going to add butter into our dough and then chill that dough. We're not going to laminate the dough. So with the cold butter, you want to rub this in with your fingers. You can also use a pastry blender. I just went straight in with my fingers because I wasn't thinking, but that's okay. Cube up that butter to make sure it's nice and small, and then what we're going to do is just rub this in until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs. So you're looking for butter that's not tiny, like pea-size. Big bits and small bits are totally fine because it's going to work its way all throughout the dough, and that's what makes it so delicious. Grab the mixture between your thumb and your finger. Do this. Look at that. This is the method of rubbing in. You do this to make crisp toblings, you do it to make biscuits, you do it to make cobblers, things like that. It was actually the first technique I ever learned. My mom showed me when I was making apple crisps. So do this step quickly so the butter doesn't start to melt, you know, with the heat of your hands. But this is what we're going for. Look at that. Some big lumps of butter, a mix. That is totally fine. We don't want to overhandle our dough or our dough will get greasy, so I'm going to stop there. So wet ingredients. Here I have some milk. I use whole milk for extra fattiness. I have my eggs in there. Like I said, this is an enriched dough so you have all those lovely ingredients like egg and butter and milk. And vanilla. Give those a little whisky whisk, just like that. And then simply just add your wet into your dry and then bring it together until it forms your dough. Just like that. It comes together really fast. Beautiful. Yes, this dough does have steps but the beauty is you can mix the dough by hand, you don't even need a stand mixer so it's actually just like really convenient. There we go. Now I'm going to take out some cling wrap and wrap this up. Put your dough onto the cling wrap like so and what I like to do, which will make your life easier later when we're doing our rolling and our folding, shape it into a rectangle so you're ready to go when we're going to roll it next. Lovely. Look at that. This is ready to go. You see those big lovely lumps of butter peeking out there. So we're going to chill this for a minimum of three hours. You can also chill it overnight if you wish. So my dough is lovely and chilled and it is ready to be rolled. Now this is a bit of a softer dough, just an FYI, so make sure you flour that surface. So now here's what we're going to do. It's actually really simple. We're going to do the same thing over and over again. So we're going to roll out our dough on our surface to 15 inches by 8 inches. Add more flour as you need it while you're rolling. Like I said, it can get a bit sticky. Do you see the way that we had it in a rectangle already? It does make life so much easier. Beautiful. Now, letterfold. Super simple. A third of your dough going over like that. Get off that extra flour. The last fold over the top of that. Just like a letter. Hence the name letterfold. Gorgeous. Done. Now, turn your dough like so and we're going to roll it again 8 inches by 15 inches. The rolling is very important because it actually contributes to the makeup of your dough in the end. So turn and fold, always. Add more flour as needed and you will notice as you progress with this dough, it'll get firmer and the butter will start to kind of evenly disperse. Okie dokie. There is our rectangle again. Here's our second letterfold. Like that. And you know what? If you need to pull those edges a little bit, get them straight or line them up, that is totally fine. Again, fold it over. Do you see what I mean? You see how lovely and straight these lines are getting? That happens as you progress. Now, what are we going to do? You got it. We are going to turn our dough. Lovely. You guys are quick learners. Turn. Again, 8 inches by 15 inches. Beautiful. Fold it again. Letterfold. Pull over the last third. Like so. Now look at that. A lovely, smooth, rectangle piece of dough. Wrap that up. Pop it into the fridge. Let it relax for an hour. Let it get nice and cold. Ok, here we go. Our dough has been rested. Time to rock and or roll. So put it like this and we are going to roll again, same as what we did before, 8 by 15 inches for a total of 3 times. You'll notice at this stage that your dough is firmer and keeping its shape better. Letterfold. Fold it over. Get off that excess flour you don't need. Fold it over again. We're turning and we're rolling. I remember now, you know, when I was 19 years of age in Colborough Street, which is the culinary school that I went to before I went to Ballymalu, and I remember the day that we were doing breakfast pastries. So there was Danish and croissant, so many others, like brioche, and we had to do it over two days because you have to make your dough, let it rest, firm up, and do all the folds, come back to it the next day, and I still remember the results. I still remember those Danish, and they absolutely blew my mind. I've never had anything like that before, and the brioche, like the classic brioche in the little fluted tin with the thing on top, and I never, I don't know, it was just a memory that stuck with me. I never forgot it, and I think probably still to this day some of the most amazing Danish I've ever eaten. Yes, this kind of a pastry can be a labor of love, but once you taste the results, like you know exactly why. Now if you're a little bit of an impatient baker, this recipe probably is not for you because you can't skimp on the chilling part, it needs that to be able to relax and also for the butter to firm up because if you roll and fold and roll and fold and roll and fold, you won't get those lovely like clean layers of like chilled butter, it'll just get kind of like greasy and too warm, so you need to really give this dough all the time and attention that it needs. Woo! That is our last roll and our last fold and I'm glad because towards the end it becomes harder to roll. There we go. Gorgeous. I'm really delighted with the feel of this dough and just how it looks. Beautiful. Okay, lovely, it's wrapped up and ready to go into the fridge for at least two hours and let it get nice and cold. Just so you know, you can prepare your dough to this stage up to two days in advance, that's what I like to do to get it ready, then the next day you just roll, you fill, and you bake. It makes life so much easier. But for right now, this puppy is going in the fridge to chill out. So our dough is hanging out and this is a good time to make your cream cheese filling so it can go back in the fridge and just chill for a little bit. So here's my cream cheese, it has been softened. If I go in with my little hand whisk, it's nice and smooth. If you need to pop it into the microwave for a few seconds, do that because you don't want this to be lumpy for your filling. Into our cream cheese we are going to add in some powdered sugar, a bit of vanilla for yumminess, and an egg yolk. Egg yolk goes in there to set our cream cheese just like the way it does in a cheesecake. So this is kind of like cheesecake filling on top of like buttery Danish yummy, yummy, yummy. Whisk it up until it's nice and smooth. You can do this with a kitchen aid, but when you're as strong as me, you don't need to. Lovely. Okay, this is ready. I'm just going to cover it up, pop it into the fridge, and let it chill a little bit and firm up so it's ready for us to pipe. It is finally time for us to assemble our danish. Lovely. So I have my floured surface here, I've got my dough, and we are going to roll this out to a little bit bigger than 12 inches by 12 inches. Might take a moment just because our dough is so cold. There we go, get that nice big square. You can still see lumps of butter in my dough, which I'm very happy about. Now you're probably wondering why did I say a little bit more than 12 by 12, and I'll tell you why. With these kinds of a dough, this isn't a laminated dough, however you do it with this dough too, with croissants, laminated biscuits, things like that, you have to do this. Get yourself a pizza cutter, or you can do it with a knife, and just slightly trim, slight, you see that? Just take away that raggedy edge, we want a lovely, smooth, crisp edge. I'm talking the bare minimum to get that nice, straight edge. After trimming it, just check it to make sure you have the right dimension. Now here's what we're going to do. We are going to cut our dough into 9 squares, 4 inches by 4 inches. The reason I hesitate there was because we had a whole big conversation before the video about how many inches. With a ruler and a pizza cutter, this makes life so much easier. And then the other side, we're going to do it again, 4 inch mark, and then we go across, just like that. Lovely! Delighted with how these turned out. Look at that. Nice and uniform, beautiful looking dough, gorgeous. Beautiful squares, and if you can see that, come here to me. Look in there, you see the lumps of little butter, and you can see layers. This is all our hard work paying off right here. This is going to be absolutely gorgeous. Now we're going to place our Danish on our tray, and to shape them, here's what we do to get that classic Danish look, we are going to bring those corners into the middle. Just like that, and give them a good pierce down, and while you're there, give an indent in the middle, not only to hold down those corners, but we're creating a little divot to put our cream cheese filling in there. Look at that. Now, when you get these the perfect square, then your Danish will be like this perfect uniform shape. Gorgeous. Now just repeat this process with the rest of your dough. So if you didn't know already, I'm a mind reader, and I think some of you might be thinking, hey Gemma, this is an awful lot of work to make nine Danish. Well let me tell you, if you want to double this dough or even triple it, you totally can, it will do that easily. And then you end up with more Danish's at the end, for the same amount of work, pretty much. Lovely. Now, you can do this with a spoon, but it's much cleaner and easier if you put your cream cheese into a piping bag, and then just pipe it in the middle. So when you're piping on your cream cheese filling, do like over a tablespoon, roughly. I will warn you, don't go too crazy, otherwise it will spill out. Lovely. These are looking fantastic. I'm going to get some cling wrap, I'm going to gently lay it over, make sure they're completely covered, and what I'm going to do is set these over to the side in my kitchen and let them proof gently for around 45 minutes to an hour roughly, we'll come back and see what they look like, we'll egg wash them, get them into the oven. So our Danish are proofed, and as you can see, they've kind of puffed up a little bit, and the edges have softened, they're a little bit rounder. That's how I know they are proofed and ready to go into the oven. But before we do that, I'm going to glaze them with a little bit of egg wash all over, just gently, so when they come out of the oven, they're a beautiful, shiny, golden brown. Fantastic. Listen, we waited all this time, these guys are finally ready to go into the oven, so let's go. Bake your Danish in a lovely hot oven, 425 degrees Fahrenheit, 220 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes. Then turn the temperature down to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, 190 degrees Celsius, and bake them for a further 5-10 minutes. You'll know when they're ready because they'll be beautiful and golden all over. That's our timer. I am gobsmacked about how fantastic these look. I'll tell you, I've made these before and I've never seen them rise so thick with so many layers. I am thrilled. They look beautiful. Lovely golden brown. I know I said there was a lot of work, but this is why we do it. And just check out how flaky it is with all those layers. All that work of rolling and folding created that, so well done. But I really want to show you what we've done by ripping it open. There you go. That's what I'm talking about. This is the best outcome I could have hoped for. It's flaky, it's tender, it's layered, it's absolutely lovely. And not only do they look great, but they taste amazing too. Traditionally this is a morning treat, so what I like to do is serve it with a dark coffee to just really balance out the sweetness of the pastry. You know what? This was a doozy of a recipe, but man are these delicious. Oh my gosh, I'm so happy with myself right now. Well, I'll admit this was an epic recipe, but the results are well worth it. If you're in the mood for more baking recipes, then stick around, I have hours of content for you to check out. I'll see you back here again next week with a brand new recipe.