An American in Leeds

Get your mitts on this My fellow Americans living abroad! Unless you've been living under a rock (lucky you), you know that it is an election year. Living abroad is no excuse not to vote! You have to request your ballot from the Federal Voting Assistance Program . It will ask you which state you lived in before you moved abroad, then will tailor what you need from there. If you want to vote in the Presidential primary, you need to get cracking. PS This applies if you need an absentee ballot as well.

Look at these beauties I've been messing around with making croissants for the past year. I hadn't quite gotten them right. But I finally cracked them and now I'm going to tell you how I did it! Originally I was using this recipe from Good Food magazine. It worked out okay, but my croissants never doubled in size when proving. They were too dense as well- more bread-like than light and flaky. I was not satisfied, and figured I could do better. Starting with typing the question "Why are my croissants too dense?" into my search engine of choice, I eventually narrowed the answer down to two possibilities: 1) kneading too long at the very beginning and 2) something something something about dough composition that was not quite right. Basically, something I was doing was turning everything too gluteny. Sooooo, I went hunting around for a recipe that would address both of these issues and turned up this one from Weekend Bakery*. Its answers to the two questi...