New Video: Crescent Rolls (Patreon)

Happy Thanksgiving Week, to those of you in the US! 

Here's a new video about Crescent Rolls that I made to celebrate. I wanted to share a tradition I have in my family, and share some thoughts about crescent rolls.

I like this video, and I hope you can tell that I had fun making it.

Behind the scenes facts (and some spoilers):

* I used 5 tubes of Pillsbury crescent roll dough in this video. One for the normal batch, one for the flat sheet, and three for the variations batch and horror batch. I had a 6th tube to try baking the whole tube still rolled up straight out of the can, but ended up not using it in the video for pacing reasons.

* I ate three crescent rolls during the making of this video. One from the normal batch, the triangle with jam that was shown at the end, and the folded one from the horror batch. To me, crescent rolls are texturally satisfying to eat when they are soft and gooey directly out of the oven, but otherwise not really my thing.

* Usually my color correction process is all about adding contrast and saturation to make sharpie colors look bold and appealing on notebook paper. But to get the subtleties to come out of the dough, I went for a soft, gentle vibe with lowered contrast and saturation. This was also to make the gentle parts of the video visually contrast with the higher contrast and saturation of the horror sequence.

* That one sequence took as long to edit as the rest of the video, but is totally worth it. Those kind of moments are the joy of video making for me. This is my art.

* I didn't use it in the video, but the horror batch baked better than I thought it would! On one face, I didn't stick the crescent roll eyebrows to the face well enough and they fell off during baking, landing perfectly as little horns, which I thought was kind of adorable.

* A commenter let me know that in Mexico crescent rolls are called cuernitos, or little horns, which is obviously correct.

* Looking back, I'm pretty sure the dough is actually supposed to be cut in isosceles right triangles, and you're supposed to unroll the sheet as squares instead of letting it stretch. There are many ways to linear algebra a triangle into an iscosceles triangle. Ah well, that can be the subject of next year's followup if I get that Pillsbury sponsorship!

I've added this video to the Thanksgiving Edible Math playlist, in case you want to revisit any from previous years.

🐌🐌,

Vi