Vegan Pain au chocolate

If you're on a New Year's diet, you may want to skip this post.....  There are thousands of calories in just the pictures.....
Probably the best present I got for Christmas was a copy of the Vegan Boulangerie.  It was a gift from my wife and it would be rude to assume she bought it so I would make her loads of scrum my stuff from it.  But possibly accurate :).

It has loads of recipes for all kinds of amazing stuff.
In fact, they pretty much boil down to a few basic and not too challenging recipes for different pastures.  Then you get to use the pastry for various different items.
Take the pain au chocolate - you make a pastry called pāte levée feuillaté (possibly...I may have the accents wrong).  Anyway, roll this up into crescents and you have croissants.  Stuff some chocolate in them and roll them a different way and hey presto! pain au chocolate.
By the way, the first review of that book on Amazon seems pretty hostile.  It's true there are two alternative recipes for pain au chocolate.

1. Open a packet of puff pastry, roll up some chocolate and slam it in the oven.
2. Spend 3 hours making a flaky buttery heated pastry then roll up some chocolate and slam in the oven.

I can see how if you bought the book and followed option 1 you might feel a little cheated.  Anyway, I did option 2 and had a massive MASSIVE grin on my face when I bit into the first one warm from the oven with molten chocolate.
Don't be put off by the technique - it's no harder than making puff pastry.  And that's not as hard as people tell you.  Just make sure you have cold hands and slam it back in the fridge at any opportunity.
By the way, we found Cookeen in the supermarket which is a vegan hard margarine - it's just vegetable fats and no hydrogenated nasties.