Making Danish pastries is like taking a minivacation … with butter

Denmark often has topped the United Nations’ annual World Happiness Report, which rates countries’ degree of contentedness.

Surely, one reason is Danish pastry.

Eating this tender treat is a joy, of course. But making Danish also can produce a deep sense of calm and satisfaction with its series of clear and deliberate steps.

You can’t be in a hurry, can’t watch the clock. Give yourself over to rolling and folding, to measuring and cutting, to filling and glazing. When you finally look over a cooling rack filled with jewel-toned fruits in golden pastries, you may be amazed at how content you feel.

A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal reported how therapists and mental health professionals across the country had begun instituting cooking and baking classes as a way to help people with depression. Baking, it found, requires people to focus on a singular activity, which gets their minds off their thoughts and feelings.

In other words, when you bake something, it’s like taking a mini-vacation. With butter.

Danish pastry is a laminated dough, meaning that butter is distributed throughout the dough to create a flaky effect. But unlike a shatteringly crisp puff pastry, Danish dough has eggs, which makes the pastry more tender, more bread-like.

Now, you may not achieve pastry shop perfection the first time out, but that’s the cool thing about baking: We learn something more each time we repeat a recipe — how the dough should feel, how much flour to use when rolling, the importance of cutting precise squares.

Plus, we’re creating! With Danish, we’re choosing which fruits to use and which shapes to make. When you’re carefully placing an apricot on a dollop of cream cheese, then nestling a few blueberries in the corners, the world’s headlines start to fall away.

Then, upon returning to the real world, there’s a plateful of Danish waiting to be eaten.

Denmark, we owe you one.