>Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly.

True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries.

Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cooki...

(Mind, I might be an edge-case, since I've practiced baking since I was five years old.)

Would be much easier to try out recipes on the net if people would use scales for flour and sugar instead of a cup...

After reading enough American news I can only joke that they are afraid that the ownership of marginally precise scales would automatically summon a police drug raid against them.

They are not uncommon, I have an electronic metric/imperial scale (they are sold in most home appliances shops). I prefer just scooping quantities out over weighing.

In any case lots of times, after you get to know the recipe, you just eyeball the proportions. No need to be super precise in most instances. We're not making alloys.

I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard it said that some types of pastry are very hard/impossible to make in some climates due to humidity. French pastries can be bought uncooked from France and baked after the flight for this reason. May be a gimmick but I worked by a place with French owners that did this. The pastries were excellent.

I don't know if that's true. I've had some pretty awesome pastries in French speaking Africa, made by French trained patissiers. Pastries that rivaled ones made in France. And this was in hot and humid climates.

The quality of pastry depends on ingredient quality, preparation, age of dough, and freshness out of the oven. There could be others.

A pastry out of the oven is delicious. Which is why pastry made in house taste better than the hours old stuff you get at chain coffee shops.