This improvement was thanks to the intricate step-by-step guidance found on here. This was the recipe which I followed, but used the strongest bread flour I could find instead of "all purpose" flour. Also, I used regular dried yeast in both the poolish and final dough. The brand of butter which I used was also an upgrade upon what I had previous been using.
However, for me, these are still short of perfection for a few reasons; the poolish requires 12-16 hours fermenting (although I left it for around 19 hours and it still worked), but it doesn't easily lend itself to "spur of the moment" baking.
The second reason, and this is just personal preference, but here butter is included in the detrempe (the dough before the layers of butter have been rolled in.) This means it takes slightly more time to prepare, but also results in a sticky-er dough which was less pleasant to work with (which had not been an issue in the previous three attempts).
As you can see, I did not give the croissants adequate room to rise on their baking tray. I think they may have also been slightly underproven before they were baked.
I would advise using a template to score the croissant rectangles - doing it by eye does not result in consistent sizes. But it seems that, to achieve the standard 7 "layers/ridges" of a rolled up croissant, the sides of the triangle need to be twice as long as the length of the upper edge. (The spirals were made from the offcuts of dough).
I reckon another few of attempts will be enough to get them absolutely perfect. (Luckily, I now own a proper rolling pin! Success!)
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