When the weather gets really hot, what cooking chores do you undertake? Something easy huh, like churn some icecream, now that would be a good idea. Prepare a salad for a light dinner, mmm, not bad. Anything really that is simple to do. So it was with some trepidation that I set off for my daughter P's house to make croissants on a day when the mercury hit 37 c (98.6 f). She had been asking for ages for me to help; there was that one false start when she put the yeast dough in a tight fitting plastic bag to rest in the fridge overnight and it had simply oozed out everywhere and another attempt went awry when without scales to weigh out the flour, P produced something apparently akin to glue. But on this day, the planets had aligned and her yeast dough was safely in a large bowl in the fridge.

It was not that she didn't have a recipe to follow, for I had faxed her a very good, detailed one from the Roux brothers excellent Patisserie book. But for all the time I have lived on this planet, I have not made croissants simply because the urge wasn't there. But P did have the urge and as a foodie I understood completely, empathetically.

As I drove over, the sun appeared as the orange, glowing end of a lit cigarette, through a haze of tarry, acrid smoke that a giant set of lungs had expelled, turning what should have been blue skies a dull grey. The smell of burning Australian bush was pervasive, a smell that can never be forgotten, containing as it does not only the scent of burnt eucalyptus, but a sense of fear and dread for what is to come. The smoke that had been blown down by the hot, northerly wind was so dense that fire alarms were going off in the city.

Not a good day for pastry making.

I heard Rick Stein say once that life was too short to make puff pastry and I suppose it is, if you have access to a quality product, but where I am no such quality exists. Sure, if I'm making homemade sausage rolls for a party, the supermarket puff is what I use, but for something special like a Beef Wellington, it has to be homemade. Really, it's not all that hard to do, but there is a lot of waiting for the butter to reharden in the fridge so it doesn't break through the layers of pastry. And croissants are simply puff pastry with the addition of yeast.

We set to, rolling out the yeast dough into that four ear shape, so that we could place the butter in the centre and fold each 'ear' back over the butter to fully enclose it, then embarked on rolling and turning and resting (chilling) that builds up the buttery layers giving that characteristic flakiness. It went well for a couple of turns too. Then the heat factor kicked in and butter started leaking through the pastry. More flour and extended resting helped a bit, but P ran out of time and went off to her singing lesson, leaving me to it.

Don't you hate it when you don't read a recipe properly?

Because I have made puff pastry before, I sort of missed the part where you need to rest the rolled up croissants for two hours prior to baking so that they double in size. So when I had finished the rolling and turning, rolled the pastry to the correct thinness, cut the triangle shape, carefully rolled each one up and gave them a distinctive crescent shape, I realized that I wouldn't be able to hang around and taste my first ever batch of croissants. Bloody hell!

So I have to tell you what my kids told me. They were damn good. The three of them said they were just like from the shop, only the shape was a little wonky.

I can live with that.