growing up, danishes were reserved for special occasions – in particular, christmas and easter morning breakfasts. these were never homemade danishes; they usually came in a big plastic container with bear claws and rugelach, but they were special nonetheless. i tried to recreate what i remember having as a kid, but it was surprisingly hard to track down a good recipe that didn’t start out with ready-made puff pastry. i finally found something that seemed to resemble what i was looking for in the Taste of Home Complete Guide to Baking, a gift from my mom.
this recipe has several parts to it, so i gave myself pretty much a whole day to tackle the danishes. it turned out to be especially challenging for me, mainly because it’s made with pastry dough, which is not something i often use. it was also my first time using shortening ever – i think i could have replaced it with cold butter, but i decided to stay faithful to the directions.
the danishes came out looking great (if i do say so myself), but the pastry was not nearly as flaky as i would have liked. i assembled these without a picture reference, basically wrapping lengths of dough into little birds-nest type holders for the cream cheese filling. you could probably replace the dough recipe below with puff pastry and just assemble these any way you think would look great, but it’s a great experience to work with a sweet yeast dough. to be honest, these didn’t quite live up to the store bought pastries i remember, but they came close.
