Second week of pastry school done and my forearms are sore from all the piping

I made choux about a dozen times before it stopped collapsing on me. What finally fixed it was drying the paste harder than I thougth I needed to, a couple extra minutes of stirring on the heat until a thin film coated the bottom of the pot. Then I let it cool until just warm before beating in the eggs one at a time, because I once added them to hot dough and ended up with soup. Egg count was my other problem. Recipes say four, but I stop at three and a half now and go by feel. The dough should slump off the spoon in a lazy hook, not run. My early batches were too loose and everythign spread into frisbees. Also don't open the oven before they've taken on deep color, even if the timer says so. Mine runs cool so they take longer than any recipe claims. If they come out soft I leave them in with the heat off and the door cracked for another ten minutes, which crisps them up most of the way.

Croissants next for you? In my one attempt the butter block placement mattered more than the folding, cold and centered with square corners. It took four batches before I got anything worth eating, and my counter looked like a butter crime scene the whole time.

Laminated doughs were where I nearly quit baking altogether, so your mix of excited and terrified tracks. I taught myself croissants over one cold January when my apartment kitchen stayed around 65 degrees, and even then my first two batches turned into butter puddles because I rushed the rests. What saved batch three was treating the fridge as part of the process: 30 to 40 minutes back in the cold between every fold, no exceptions, even when the dough felt fine to me. temperture matters more than technique in my experiance. If the butter bends like plastic wrap instead of snapping, it's too warm and it will smear into the layers no matter how careful your letter folds are. I once grated frozen butter for the block when I was short on time, and it worked better than it had any right to. The payoff is worth it though. Nothing from choux week quite prepares you for pulling open your first croissant and hearing it crackle. I still make a double batch every winter and freeze half of them shaped, then bake them straight from the fridge on a slow Sunday morning.

This is making me want to try choux again after my profiteroles turned out like dense little hockey pucks last month. I think I underbaked them becasue I panicked at the color and pulled them early. Question though, once they're baked do you all cut a hole and pipe the filling in, or poke from the bottom? I've seen both and can't tell which keeps them from going soggy overnight. Also genuinely nervous about laminated dough week for you, I can barely keep my pie crust cold, so folding butter repeatedly sounds like my personal nightmare.

I've never tried that fancy french dough but the way you describe it makes me want to. My only go at puffy cream things years ago came out like dense little hockey pucks, no idea what went wrong, prolly everything. The tower part sounds intimidating though. Gluing baked blobs together with melted sugar seems like a fast way to burn your fingers and have the whole thing slide off the plate. Do you do the sugar part in a regular pot on the stove or is there some trick to it?

On the filling question, I always poke from the bottom with a chopstick and pipe through that. Doesn't leave a visible hole and the cream goes in way deeper. Only downside is if you overfill they weep a bit from the top, so go easy.

Also, for whoever's doing laminated dough soon, don't skip the little rest between turns even if you're feeling impatient. I tried to power through all the folds once and the butter just shredded into the dough instead of staying in layers. Still tasted fine but they came out more like sad biscuits than croissants.