The dough used in danishes is similar to the dough used in croissants. It is a very flaky, buttery yeast dough that takes more than a little bit of time and patience to put together. Sometimes it’s nice to dawdle over a batch of pastry on a lazy weekend morning, but other times it’s nice to get something delicious onto your plate a little more quickly. One solution is to run to the local bakery and pick up some danishes, but another is to make a quick batch of danish using puff pastry instead of a more traditional danish dough. Puff pastry is easy to work with and produces a crisp, flaky delicious danish – especially considering that it takes so little time to make a batch.
The secret to making these danishes so good is the cream cheese filling inside. It is made with cream cheese and white chocolate. The white chocolate gives it a rich, creamy feel and just the right amount of sweetness. A good quality white chocolate (not white baking chips) will have notes of milk and vanilla in it, which will help round out the flavor of the cream cheese. The cream is delicious on its own and bakes very well, staying tender and moist within its crisp puff pastry shell.
Now, if you’re a purist, you could keep the cream cheese danish filling plain and serve the pastries that way. I used mixture of raspberry and peach preserves to sweeten them up a little more. Any flavor of jam will work here, but thicker jams and preserves will tend to spread less during baking and produce a slightly prettier danish in the end. This is another good example of a recipe that you can use as a jumping off point for creating your own variations. The 1,2,3 Puff! Contest that Pepperidge Farm is holding is still accepting entries and a mouthwatering Danish – or similarly enticing pastry – sounds like it would have a great chance of being a prize winner. The grand prize is an all-expenses paid trip to New York (along with some foodie bonuses, like a tour of NYC pastry shops and bakeries!), but that’s just the bonus of experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.