Adventures in Pain au Lait

I had one of the nicer Saturdays in a while this past weekend (thanks to a trip to Trader Joe's and the local Farmers' Market), and I followed it up by baking the pain au lait I prepared on Friday night into cream cheese snails and pain aux raisins.

Couple of things:

I have to make sure I work faster next time. I kept on re-rolling the dough for the pain aux raisins because I wasn't happy with my rectangle, and the dough started to get warm and stick like crazy. In the end, the dough was uneven, and some parts were thinner than others, resulting in major tearing. Some of the rolls were more like blobs of dough, raisins, and cinnamon.

I should make less cream cheese filling next time. After measuring out the amount specified in the recipe, I realized I had only a spoonful more of cream cheese left in the package so I threw it in. The snails ended up covered in, rather than filled with, cream cheese. Still tasty, though.

When I finished, I realized I had around 2 dozen pastries (after eating some, of course) that I would never be able to eat before they went bad. So, I ended up bringing them to my rehearsal tonight. All but one cream cheese snail were taken.

Agenda for next week: try the cranberry-chocolate sweet buns. Well, raspberry-chocolate sweet buns (no frozen cranberries at TJ's).

EDIT:  Oh, I forgot! I finally got my own instant yeast (I had been using my roommate's active dry). Amazing stuff.