Raisin Danish Pastry – Pain Au Raisin
These pain aux raising or raisin Danish pastry spirals use the classic Danish pastry dough filled with pastry cream and rum-soaked raisins. The laminated dough results in a rich, buttery, tender yet flaky pastry.
Danish pastries, or Viennese (wienerbrød) in Denmark, is made with a laminate dough similar to puff pastry and croissants. And, Danish pastry dough includes yeast, eggs, sugar, and butter. Then, it’s laminated with more butter, which results in tender but rich flaky, buttery pastries with lots of layers.
You can use the Danish pastry dough to create many different shapes or varieties of Viennese (pastries), such as these pastry cream raisins spirals, cinnamon sugar spirals, and danish pinwheels or darts, cylinders, stars, braids, envelopes, pockets, combs, squares, horns, etc.
The filling in these shapes can be different as well. You can pick any shape and choose a filling. For example, try cream cheese, almond cream, pastry cream, jams, and fruit fillings as well as fresh fruits. In fact, the options are endless.
Danish pastry has always been my weakness. And soon, I plan to share many of these shapes and filling using the danish dough.
Why make this Danish pastry
- As I said above, we are using the danish pastry dough as our base and pastry cream as our choice for filling. And yet, you can also use cream cheese, as we did in our Danish strawberry braid, and Danish pastry pinwheels or almond cream, as we did in our blackberry braid.
- In addition, this is a very forgiving dough that’s easy to knead with a stand mixer or by hand. There are four main components to this danish pastry spirals:
The dough – this is a simple yeast-based dough with eggs, butter, and sugar. It can be soft and sticky to work with, so don’t skip the chilling times.
Butter block – yes, it is lots of butter, which we cream with a little flour and then laminate between the dough. The purpose of the flour in the butter is to help stabilize it. Most professionals often skip the flour, but I recommend you use it.
Pastry cream – made with milk, cream, sugar, and egg yolks, then, cooked until thickened. You need to chill it for at least 4 hours before you use it.
Raisins – I am soaking these in rum for 4 hours. But, you can just soak these in warm water for an hour. The purpose of soaking the raisins is so they are moist and tender before we add them to the pastry. As a result, they do not take moisture out of the pastry.
Bakers schedule
- Make and chill the dough – 10 + 15 mins
- Make and chill the butter block – 10 + 15 minutes
- Laminate the dough – 10 minutes
- First fold, then chill the dough – 10 + 20 minutes
- Second fold, then chill the dough – 10 + 20 minutes
- Third fold, then chill the dough – 10 + 2 hours (up to 48 hours)
- Prepare cream cheese – 10 minutes
- Prepare apricot glaze – 5 minutes
- Shape the danish – 20 minutes
- Proof the danish – 45 minutes
- Bake – 15 to 20 minutes
- Active time – 1 hr 40 mins, Inactive time – 4hrs 30 mins
This is a classic danish dough and you could use the same dough to make other shapes and filings too such as the Danish cream cheese cylinders, Danish pinwheels, Danish braided pastry, etc.
