Sunny-Side Up Apricot Pastries - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 66th installment. The recipe is Sunny-Side Up Apricot Pastries.

I enjoyed this puff pastry adventure.  The pastry itself was fairly easy - few ingredients, and since it's cool right now, I didn't struggle with the butter or rolling.  You make a simple dough, as the recipe says, like Play Doh, in the food processor.  You pound out the cold butter into a one inch thick slab. 

I got the "European-style" butter, hoping that it would make the pastry extra yummy, although it came in 8 ounce slabs, so I had two chunks instead of one.  You roll out the (play) doh/dough, put the butter on the center, and then fold the dough around the butter like an envelope.

At this point you start the serious rolling and folding.  I did not watch the video from the episode, so was just following the written instructions.  My rolling surface (a silicon sheet) has inch markings, so I was able to tell when I had rolled it out to the correct length (24 inches!).  You roll to 24 inches long, and then fold in three layers, like a letter.  You do the roll/fold cycle once or twice, and then chill.  You repeat these steps until it has been rolled and folded a total of six times.
Here's the dough when it had been through all the rolling and folding, with a million (OK, not a million) tiny layers of butter and dough rolled together.

At this point the dough is ready to roll and cut.  I cut out the circles using a bowl as a guide.  I bet a really sharp cutter works well for this, as it would cut through the layers cleanly - I think my tracing around the bowl with a knife made the edge a little squished.
There were no apricots to be had in my store, so I used local prune plums instead.  You poach the fruit and make a vanilla cream - mine was a little bit "tough", as I think I should have cooked it more gently, but it tasted good anyway.  
Here are the pastries before baking:

The pastries were delicious!  I would defintely prepare this again.  And I put the remaining puff pastry in the freezer for the next installment of puff pastry, later this month (to be continued... :-)