Start off with an obscene amount of flour. I mean, take out your bag of flour and just dump that shit out into a bowl. Are you sure you don't have any more? Ok, fine. I guess we can make do.
Add in some salt, then drop in a fingernail's worth of softened butter. Spend a few minutes searching for the butter within the flour. Once you find it, use a fork to really mix it in there. You'll know when it's well incorporated, trust me. You just will. If all else fails, consult your tarot deck.
Pour in some water and a little lemon juice, for wizardry reasons, and start mixing. You will end up with a nasty, stringy, tough dough and a bunch of matted flour. Keep working the dough until all of the flour is incorporated. I don't know how, just do it! Maybe add some more water in. It will look like something found at the bottom of your grandmother's sewing basket, but with less teeth. Nevermind that.
Once your lumpy, ugly dough monster has been brought to fruition, wrap it in ragged ribbons of cling wrap and leave it in the fridge for a long time.
Take all of your butter and also all of your neighbours' butter, cold from the fridge, and sprinkle it with about two tablespoons of flour. What we're going to do is work the flour into the cold butter until it's pliable, like play-do, but not sticky. To start off, use a rolling pin to smash the butter flat, because god is dead and life is hell. Most of the butter will fly out and land in various parts of your kitchen. Unstick it from the floor and the walls and put it back on the counter. You forgot the cling wrap, silly!
Once the butter is safely covered in thin strings salvaged from your defective cling wrap container, you cheap-o, smash it with that rolling pin again. Despite being cold, the butter will immediately flatten and start melting. Stick it in the fridge for an hour.
Take the butter out and smash it again. It will melt against the rolling pin. Put more flour on top of the butter, fold it, then smash again. Repeat. It is still very sticky.
Put it back in the fridge and wait patiently for an hour.
As soon as you have taken it out of the fridge, it will immediately start sticking to everything, despite the fact that your kitchen is chilly and the milk in the back of the fridge has a thin layer of ice. It must be you, you sassy hottie! Cover with a cup of flour. Smash, fold over, smash, fold over, smash, fold over. Keep smashing until you bust a knuckle open, place back in the fridge.
Take the ball of dough out and lay it on a lightly floured counter. Start rolling it out. You want it to be bigger than the butter patty. Unfortunately, the dough will be lively and resistant to change, preferring to scoot around the counter gleefully rather than being flattened or stretched in any way, but just keep railing against it, and eventually you will get so tired that you won’t care anymore and just call it a success, either way.
Once you have gotten carpal tunnel, place the butter patty on top of the dough and fold the dough around it like an envelope. Naturally, it will be too small. Just wet the dough and pinch that slimy shit closed the best you can.
Take this defective little dough envelope and start rolling it thinner. The butter will immediately find holes in the dough and stick to everything. Desperately break off bits of dough from one place and patch it over another, over and over again. Faster, faster! Finally, ignore the butter sticking to your hands and hair and rolling pin and just do the best you can. Fold the dough into thirds and stick it in the fridge.
After you have written through chapter 3, go back to the dough and roll it out into a rectangle. Fold it into thirds and put it back in the fridge.
Complete the next few chapters of your memoirs.
Get the dough out again. Repeat.
Make sure to write in detail about your teenage years and early twenties. It’ll take a while.
Throw out the last couple of chapters and write a list of all the socks you have ever owned, ranked. Make it juicy!
The dough, rather than being sticky, will now be unresponsive and thick, like trying to roll out a large eraser.
Repeat many, many more times. Fold the dough through the day, into the night, and past the first crowing of the rooster, and then do it some more because roosters have a shitty sense of time and it's probably like, 1 am. Finish your memoirs, then burn and rewrite them. Once you have processed every misgiving and trauma in your life, are fully at peace and have no more regrets, you will know that the dough is done.
Look up pictures of puff pastry dough on the internet. It will have many thin, sharply defined layers. It will be beautiful. Your dough does not look like that. It looks plain and a little gray, like your perception of self on the second week of having the flu.
Well, too late now, because your dough is finished.
You can now do whatever you want with it.
Look up some ideas on the internet about what to do with puff pastry. Nearly all of them will start with, “Take a sheet of frozen, store bought puff pastry,” and mention how easy and effortless this recipe is. Set your computer on fire and cry. Put your puff pastry in the fridge, just for now, then forget it ever happened to you.
