Sara Lee pains au chocolat

I've got a cold. Cooking properly isn't an option this evening; I'm spluttering all over everything and have somehow become very vague; earlier I put a mug of tea down and couldn't work out where I'd left it. A few hours later I found it in the fridge. Any recipe I come up with in this state is bound to be a disaster. It's time for another product review.

Pains au chocolat (chocolate croissants, unaccountably, if you are American) are one of France's baking triumphs. When I lived in Paris, the pains au chocolat from Carton (6 Rue de Buci, Paris, 6ème) were a treat to be lingered over, dipped, flaking, into a thick hot chocolate; we'd travel a long way across Paris just for breakfast there. Here in our little village in the middle of English nowhere, there isn't a baker attempting anything like a pain au chocolat for fifteen miles. Drive those fifteen miles to Cambridge and the pains au chocolat you can find are usually strangely enormous - the size of a man's fist - and stale and doughy. It's seemingly impossible to reproduce the essential freshness that Carton manages, where the pains au chocolat go straight from the oven into your steaming, craving maw.

I was intrigued when I saw this very compact pack of ready-to-bake pains au chocolat on the same shelf as the butter in Sainsbury's. Nothing ventured and all that; I plonked the tube in the trolley.

Always a sucker for good packaging, I was absolutely delighted by the ingenious packaging on this. The cardboard and plastic tube unravels in a spiral to reveal a soft roll of dough, which has been packed under pressure and expands gently when released from the packet.

This dough, once unrolled, is scored into neat squares, which means that you don't need a knife to make the little rolls; no mess and no fuss at all. Simply lay the chocolate sticks provided on the squares of dough, roll up and put in the oven. It took me under two minutes to make all six rolls and get them in a preheated oven.

The results? Really surprisingly good for something that took me two minutes to prepare straight from a tin. These pains au chocolat were buttery and had a flaky crumb. They'd stinted on the quality of the chocolate; another time I would substitute some Green and Black's for the sad little sticks included in the tube. A certain yeasty something was missing from the flavour of the pastry, and they did end up looking a bit more like sausage rolls than the gorgeous cylinder of puffy perfection on the tin - but at two minutes and less money than six of these would have been pre-cooked and loose at the bakery counter, who's counting?