This morning, I completed June’s Daring Bakers challenge, the Danish braid, because we don’t have enough carbs in the house. What with the cake, the biscuits, the Tuesdays with Dorie scones. If not for Simply Orange, we’d have scurvy.

There are three things you should know if you decide to make this Danish braid:

1. The entire process takes at least eight hours. The dough rests in the fridge for five. So, you’ll need to set aside an afternoon or evening to prep the dough. The process isn’t all that intense, but you’ll be rolling and folding the dough four times, with 30-minute breaks in between. Plenty of time to catch up on the laundry, take a multivitamin, or watch way too much Law and Order. Guess which one I did.

2. If you’ve neither seen nor eaten a Danish braid before, it’s basically a glorified Hot Pocket® with buttery, flaky layers. You can fill it with roughly a cup of anything you like: ham and cheese, apples and almonds, Nutella and hazelnuts, spinach and feta, cherries and cream cheese. The dough recipe you’ll find at the end of this post makes two Danish braids. My first was cinnamon, sugar, and toasted pecans. The second was pepperoni, ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan, and basil. If you decide to make a savory braid, use the given dough recipe, but leave out the orange zest, cardamom, vanilla, and orange juice.

3. The braiding is no big deal. A Danish braid is a laminated dough. Instead of combining the butter and a flour mixture, you keep them separate and fold the butter between the layers of dough. Your first one or two turns of the dough might look pretty ragged; just keep going. With every turn, the dough will get smoother. And, if you can lace your shoes, you can braid this dough.

Once you’re done, you’ll have two rich, buttery braids that look impressive, taste delicious, and contain 100 percent of your daily allowance of vitamins and minerals. And by “vitamins and minerals,” I mean butter. Enjoy!

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I’ve lost my techno mojo.

Saturday morning, I baked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, a cream puff ring chosen by Caroline of A Consuming Passion. Monday night, I plugged in my digital camera, and the photos were gone. The next day, I baked another cream puff ring, took more photos, wrote another post, and our cable Internet connection went out. The cable came back; the post didn’t. Yesterday, I wrote another post. Added the photos. It didn’t save.

So, once more with feeling, let’s talk cream puffs.

Before you ignore the recipe link, let me warn you that you’ll be missing out on something amazing. You probably have everything you need for the dough right now: milk, butter, sugar, salt, flour, and eggs. You’re going to boil the liquid, add the flour, and stir the mixture until it makes a smooth dough that smells like really buttery grits. Place the dough in the bowl of your mixer, and paddle out the steam before you add the eggs.

To form the cream puffs, either pipe or spoon the dough into portions the size of a golf ball onto a prepared baking sheet. They’ll need to be about two inches apart. If your kitchen is really warm and things are looking messy, pop the entire baking sheet into the freezer for up to 30 minutes.

Once your cream puffs have baked and cooled, slice them in half and fill them with whatever you’d like: pastry cream, flavored whip cream, fruit, nuts, Nutella, chocolate, tofurkey. Then put the tops of the cream puffs back on, and dust them with confectioner’s sugar.

The hollow pastries can hold a surprising amount of filling, but once you add it, the meter is ticking. You’ve got approximately eight hours before they go soggy. Prepare to share!

P.S. I hope this post actually makes it to you this time. One, two, three … PUBLISH!