Seasonal Sweets: Banana-Chocolate "Faux-ssants"

[Photographs: Eunice Choi]

Ed. Note: Welcome to our newest column, Seasonal Sweets, where Jenny McCoy—pastry chef, ICE instructor, and author of Desserts for Every Season—will be sharing a recipe that highlights the best ingredients of the season. First up? Easy chocolate-banana croissants.

No, this recipe is not another cronut contender. It's just a super simple method for making delicious, buttery, and flaky croissants filled with fresh banana and semisweet chocolate batons. What could be better?

But first, I must make my apologies to Dorie Greenspan and Julia Child. I know they would understand my desire for simplicity, but I'm just not sure how they'd feel about me suggesting puff pastry dough instead of the traditional yeast-risen, laminated croissant dough that's been used for croissant-making for the last couple hundred years or so. But it was their recipe for croissant dough in Baking with Julia that nearly brought me to tears one Sunday morning about 15 years ago. Moving on...

This recipe is easy—it calls for only five ingredients (hooray!), and outside of what might be a moment of confusion when measuring and cutting your dough into triangles, it's a recipe you'll come to love.

Instead of making homemade croissant dough—which involves a multi-day process of layering dough and butter, rolling, and folding several it times to create all the distinctive layers in a croissant—you just use frozen puff pastry dough and voila! And for all your Francophile friends, just serve them your "faux-ssants" warm. So long as you use frozen puff pastry made will all butter and no shortening (read the ingredient label) they'll never know the difference.

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