Category Archives: cake

French cake a week – gateau aux amandes

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Gateau aux amandes

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962.Last week I rambled on and on about how much I like songs about ramblers. Specifically those of Robert Johnson. The truth is I’m fascinated by books and films about drifters and wanderers as well. Perhaps the fascination stems from the fact that I’m such a homebody myself, and I really can’t imagine what it feels like to be completely rootless. I’m so deeply entrenched in a routine, so deeply involved with my family, so fond of my house, and my garden, and my own bed. Sometimes I feel as though I’d like a break from my routine. Sometimes, in spring, I get the urge to leave town – to just go – with no plan and no purpose. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just take off – no ties, no cares, no possessions or responsibilities. But I never feel that way for long, and I can’t imagine needing to be on the road, being uncomfortable in a room, or in one place for long.

Somehow the idea of a wild wanderer takes on more strange significance for me when the rambler in question is a woman. One of my favorite films on the subject, by one of my favorite filmmakers, is Agnes Varda’s Sans toit ni loi. It’s a bleak but beautiful film that tells the story of Mona, a vagabond who travels through French wine country in the icy, lonely off-season. She’s a complicated, thorny character, and we learn about her through her encounters with others – some who are cruel and some who are kind. Some feed her and give her a warm place to stay, some reject her and the way she’s chosen to live, some abuse her. It unfolds slowly and beautifully at a quiet, deliberate pace, punctuated by moments of human interaction – brief pockets of time in which Mona finds food, and warmth, and conversation.

Gateau aux amandes

One of the ways in which people show Mona kindness is by feeding her, or preparing meals with her, but I doubt they make anything like this gateau aux amandes! In complete contrast to last week’s French cake, which was very mild and plain, this one is quite rich and sweet. It’s a no-bake cake, consisting of a layer of ladyfinger cookies surrounding a center of ground almonds, sugar and creme fraiche. It’s very delicious, but not for the faint of heart. I decided to try to make my own ladyfinger cookies, based on the knowledge that the batter is very similar to the gateau de savoie recipe, and based on some notes scribbled in my cookbook that I assumed were a secret recipe for biscuits cuiller. It’s quite amusing, really, how much of a fail this was! I can laugh about it now! The cookies are supposed to be piped onto a tray. I don’t have a pastry bag, so I used a spoon to make the finger shape. After two minutes, I looked in the oven and saw that everything had grown together into one big lake of batter. Ha ha ha!! How we laughed! So I decided to run with that idea, and I baked some on a small jelly roll pan. Then I cut out pieces the size of a lady finger cookie. Not the prettiest thing ever, but very very tasty! The recipe says to serve the cake with vanilla cream, but I think it’s sweet enough as it is. It’s nice cut into thin slices, served with fresh fruit, or a tart-fruit compote.

Here’s Claude Francois with Reveries. I love this crazy video! I want to be one of his soave back-up dancers.
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French cake a week – galettes du vexin

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Galettes du vexin

This morning, after walking the boys to school, I came home and sat and listened to the silence. I was still feeling sleepy – both boys had been up through the night, and then somewhere nearby a screech owl had been calling. So this morning, I had a lovely feeling of sinking into the silence. Our house can be so noisy when both boys are in full, loud, little-boy mode. It’s nice to rest your ears, from time-to-time. I love quiet moments – in films, in conversations, in music.

Of course, there’s no such thing as real silence in our life, and the more I listened the more I heard. Our house it attached, and I could hear small sounds from our only neighbors, two stories up. We live on one of the few big streets in town, and it was as close to rush hour as we get around here. (Which is more likely to mean lots of dogs walking by, than lots of traffic.) Our house is old, it creaks; the birds sing outside; appliances hum; people call to one another out on the street. If you’ve ever made a film, you’re familiar with the noisiness of rooms, because you’ve recorded “room tone.” You’ve recorded the noises that each room makes. And these noises fill in the wordless moments of the film, because pure silence would be shocking. It would seem unnatural, and you’d know you were watching a movie. A fact Godard demonstrates delightfully in Bande a Part. You can’t really tell from this clip, but it’s a beautiful scene. And maybe, sitting in the cafe with Anna Karina, at the next table, perhaps, somebody was eating these Galettes du vexin. These little cakes are like a moment of silence in the teeming dessert section of my french cookbook. In a chapter filled with sugar and butter and icing and creams and cookies and jams and rum, these are barely sweet enough to be called dessert. They’re more like buttermilk biscuits! Or even scones. They contain creme fraiche, which is lovely, and was very fun and easy to make. I was smitten with its beautifully creamy appearance. The little cakes are tender and mild. They seem very simple, but they have a distinctive flavor, if you take the time to discern it. It’s like listening to the silence! The more you pay attention, the more you notice.

Here’s Anna Karina singing La Vie est Magnifique.
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French cake a week – Gateau chipolata

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Gateau chipolata

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak french, bakes her way through the cake section of a 1962 French cookbook.
“L’intérieur du gateau doit rester moelleux.” Says my cook book. Oh yes, say I, the interior of the cake should stay soft! Moelleux is a nice word, isn’t it? A soft word. A melty word. I love melty things! I love when the snow melts in the springtime, ice dripping from branch tips and releasing the buds from their frosty casing. I love ice cream mostly because it melts. It’s such a pleasant anxiety to eat it before it’s a puddle – to savor each spoonful or lick of the cone when it’s just the right creamy softness, before it’s just cream. It’s about time passing! Add hot fudge and you have the frisson of warm and cold, you have the changing of seasons. I like butter melting on toast, cheese melting into warm bread, secret melted cheese or chocolate hidden inside of things, a chocolate-covered cookie melting in tea. I love the melty feeling you get inside when you’re happy, when you feel love for something. I like the scene in Amelie when she melts – she turns into water and melts away into a puddle. Amelie, of course, is french and very sweet, and so is this cake! It is delicious! It’s crispy on the outside, soft in the middle (as it should be), chocolatey, a little crunchy because of the almonds. It’s somewhat similar to the cake I made last week, in that it’s flourless and chocolate, but it’s denser, and last week’s cake had quite a lot of cornstarch in it, and this has much less. The recipe didn’t specify an amount of butter – I think it must be a misprint. This being a french cake, I decided to add a whole stick (1/2 cup)! And I decided to add salted butter, because the recipe doesn’t call for salt, and I like a pinch of salt in my baked goods.

Here’s Nouvelle Vague with I’ll Melt with You.

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French cake a week – Gateau au chocolat

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Gateau au chocolat

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak French, bakes her way through the cake section of a 1962 french cookbook. Well! Today was the first day of school. You know I could talk about the ache of time passing, and how fast summers go, and days and months and years go. You know I could talk about regret for every wasted moment this summer, regret that I did anything but play with my boys, or take them places you can only go in the summer – creeks and rivers and wild wooded trails. I could talk about my trip to the doctor with Isaac yesterday, when they did a simple ultrasound of his belly and neck, but the technician let him see his heart beating, and it nearly did me in, with its strength and fragility, nestled in his beautiful rib cage, in his beautiful pale growing body. I could talk about how last night he was up a lot in the middle of the night, worrying about the first day of school and spiders crawling through the hole in his screen, and how I cuddled with him for a few minutes, and liked the feeling of his little hands holding my ears for comfort. But then I needed sleep, so I kissed him and left him whimpering in his bed. And then I had nightmares about leaving the boys to sleep in the basement of a horrible apartment building, while David and I slept upstairs, scared of our neighbors. I could talk about the rich, hot summer passing, and how we long for sharp smoky autumn. But, oddly, I didn’t have any time today, despite the fact that I had seven hours all to myself for the first time in months. So I made a playlist of Antoine Forqueray and Marin Marais, and I’ll let them tell you about it all. This is what I grew up calling Late French Viol Music. It’s from the 18th century. It’s ridiculously beautiful. Wistful, hopeful, like late summer, like autumn. They know about time passing.

This music has always felt like red wine and dark chocolate, to me. Which brings us to our French-cake-a-week. I’ve been trying to do all the simple ones, so this week I did the simple Gateau au chocolat. It’s a lovely flourless chocolate cake. But it does have quite a bit of corn starch, which I found surprising. The cake is extremely simple – and like the last few cakes, it has no leavening, but it got tall and puffy anyway. David said it’s crispy on top, then moist, then cakey. It’s like every good kind of brownie mixed in one cake. I don’t have a bundt pan, so I invented one with a quart-sized souffle dish with a little souffle cup, open-side up, buttered into the bottom. I made a strange looking cake! But lovely and tasty. We ate it with vanilla-flavored whipped cream, but it’s a cake that would be perfect for any of your simple cake needs. With berries, with creme anglaise, in a trifle…

Gateau au chocolat

Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray, as played by Jordi Savall, the genius.
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French cake a week – gateau de savoie

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Gateau de savoie

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak french, bakes her way through the cake section of a 1962 french cookbook.
We’re keeping it simple again this week, in our french-cake-a-week division, with a lovely gateau de savoie. This cake is, in truth, remarkably similar to last week’s genoise. The ingredients are nearly identical. The difference is that the eggs are separated, in this cake, this cake has less butter, and the cake is baked in a deep dish. Last week, I went on and on (and on) about how a genoise is like my favorite movie, L’atalante. This week we’ll continue the tradition, because I’d like to tell you about Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre. (I promise not to ramble on about how the film is like a cake, but I have to tell you that one of the youTube comments on the trailer is “such a beautiful film, simple and deep,” which could be said exactly of a gateau de savoie, with one word switched.) L’atalante begins in the port town of Le Havre, and the town is (suprise!) the setting of Kaurismaki’s film. Le Havre tells the story of a former bohemian poet-turned-shoeshiner. He’s a man with a simple but pleasant life. But when his wife falls ill and he makes a new friend, his world is gently, subtly turned upside down. The characters are ordinary people; the lovers are older, they’re not glamorous; the story is slow and simple, but it tells of huge changes in the life of an old man and a young boy. The film is beautifully made, all sea-green and rusted red, with a style and grace reminiscent of much older films. Despite the perfectly professional technical quality of the film and the admirable attention to detail, it looks like they had fun making it – in some places it’s as though an old group of friends got together to shoot a movie. Similarly, though the film teeters on the edge of tragedy, and peers into some deep, dark places, it retains a lightness and a wry humor. I’d heard, once, that tragedy ends in death and comedy ends in marriage, and Le Havre ends with the salvation of a marriage. It’s a funny thing, but my reaction at the end of the film was that Kaurismaki was brave to end the movie the way that he did. I remember discussions, back in the days of endless talking, about the fact that comedies could never be weighty or substantial – they could never be great works of art. Only a tragedy could be considered high art; comedies are low, they’re light. I’ve always found that idea troubling. I think it’s actually more difficult to create something happy. It’s easy to be shocking, depressing, degrading. It’s the refuge of juvenile directors to make sad and disturbing films, and express scorn for anything joyful or pretty. And yet real life is a combination of joy and sorrow, of beauty and ugliness, and I admire anyone who can tell a story that shows this, with humor and taste, and just the right amount of sweetness.

Gateau de savoie

So, this cake is deep, and light, and subtly sweet. Because of its simplicity it makes a nice base for other flavors – for fruit and cream, or compotes, or liqueurs or syrups. The directions require you to bake it in “un moule profond.” That’s right, a baking dish deep and full of meaning. I don’t have a wide selection of cake pans, so I used a quart-sized souffle dish – about 6 inches wide and 3 inches deep. It worked perfectly! The recipe suggested that you make a ring of paper to help contain the batter, and I did, but it wasn’t really necessary. The recipe also stated that you could use the “parfum” of your choice, and suggested vanilla, fleur d’orange, lemon zest. I chose a bit of vanilla and a bit of rum, because that’s what I had. When I made the genoise I couldn’t resist adding a bit of salt, but I didn’t do that this time, instead I cheated by using salted butter! The cake has very little butter, though, which contributes to its lovely lightness. The recipe also says that you can substitute starch for half the flour. I assume they mean corn starch, but I didn’t have any, so I went for the all-flour option.

Here’s Mr McTell Got the Blues, by Blind Willie McTell, used to nice effect in Le Havre.
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French cake a week – Genoise

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Genoise

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962.

We went back to basics, for this french-cake-a-week-cake, with a Genoise. And now I’m going to tell you all the ways that a genoise is like my favorite movie. To begin with, there’s the frenchness. My favorite movie is L’atalante, by Jean Vigo, which was shot in France in 1934. To go on with, a genoise is a very very simple cake. In its simplicity, the full subtle sweetness of the flavor shines through. I say, “sweetness,” but in truth I don’t mean sugary sweetness. The genoise is not the least bit cloying, it has a scant half cup of sugar (by my calculations). The method of making a genoise is (to me) unusual and completely delightful. It doesn’t involve leavening, rather you whisk whole eggs until they’re frothy and “ribbony,” and this is what gives the cake its lift and texture. I was childlike in my amazement! I’m sure I’ve seen video of people making this cake, but I’d never done it myself. I kept saying “this is fun! this is my idea of fun!” (David, passing through the kitchen at that moment, muttered, “poor kid,” and patted me on the head.) L’atalante, similarly, is sweet without being cloying. Aesthetically, it’s unusual, but the method makes so much sense as you watch it, that it feels nearly perfect. Visually and emotionally it’s the exact right combination of light and darkness. It has a real elegance, not from sophistication or stylishness, but from the deft, loving way that the shots are framed and the plot is revealed. It has a fine crumb. The characters are simple as well – they’re not a bit glamorous – but they’re beautiful in the way that kind people become beautiful when you know them well. Many stories end with a wedding, and tell you the dramatic story of the relationship leading up to it. L’atalante starts with a wedding, and tells you the story of the life of the newly-married couple in the weeks after. It’s as mundane, dreamy, messy, glowing, erotic, and bewildering as real human love. And it has Michel Simon, the slightly tart apricot jam on the top of the cake.

I’m not sure I made the cake exactly as it was meant to be made. As I’ve said, the instructions in my cookbook are slight, vague, and in a foreign language. But I think it came out precisely as it was supposed to. (I wouldn’t change anything about it!) I’ve read that the eggs are supposed to be whisked over a bain marie, but I didn’t see any indication of that in my recipe. I was conflicted about how to proceed. I decided to hold my very thick pottery bowl over the warm burner on which I’d melted the butter. This seemed like a good compromise! My eggs became perfectly frothy and mousse-like (…le mélange soit devenu mousseux.) Perhaps it’s because the day was so warm. If I tried this again in colder weather, I might arrange a bain marie. We shall see! I added a pinch of salt. Also, the instructions said to mix icing sugar with an eggwhite for the final glaze. I’m a coward about using raw eggs, so I combined icing sugar with a bit of milk, and drizzled this on the edges and down the sides. It adds a nice sort of crunchy crust to the otherwise soft, light yet dense cake. I believe the genoise is the base for many other fancier cakes, and I’ll certainly be making it again and trying out different fancifications.

Genoise

Here’s Le chalande qui passe sung by Lys Gauty. This song was an influence on the film, and at one point the title of the film was changed to Le chalande qui passe.

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French cake a week #3 – Gateau savarin

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Gateau Savarin

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak french, bakes her way through the cake section of a french cookbook from 1962.
Oh, how we laughed as we made this cake! We gathered in my immaculate kitchen, my perfectly obedient boys danced around me, singing songs about raspberries and strawberries in fluent french. Every stage of the process went perfectly, and we smiled as we popped the cake in the oven! We certainly didn’t curse the fact that we know french much less well than we thought. We certainly didn’t swear at google translate for making absurd suggestions as to the translations of french words. We didn’t frown anxiously as Malcolm said, “are you sure that’s the right amount?” We didn’t get called away from the dough at a critical moment, and leave it in Malcolm’s capable but unpredictable hands. We didn’t hear him say, “Ooh, t’s like play-doh!” as we left the room, and we didn’t think about the fact that when Malcolm plays with play-doh I generally have to peel it off the ceiling. We didn’t let it rest for an hour and then find a lump of stodgy dough with bits of dried yeast clinging to it. We didn’t add lots of other ingredients that didn’t mix in, only to find ourselves up to our elbows in a a sludgy mess. Certainly not!

I let Malcolm choose which cake to make by opening to a page in the book, and seeing which name he liked best. He chose the gateau savarin. It’s a yeasted cake with very little sugar, and then you pour a sugary, alcohol-laden syrup over, which soaks in and sweetens and flavors the whole thing. Kind of like a rum baba, really! If I was being perfectly honest, I would tell you that I had some trouble with this one. (Spoiler alert, it turned out very good in the end, and it was worth all the trouble, and I’m glad I didn’t give up half way through and throw the dough against the wall and stomp out of the house in a terrible temper, which, of course, I wasn’t tempted to do at all.) I have diagnosed my problem, and I think it’s because the yeast I used is the little packets of yeast granules, and I have no earthly idea what kind of yeast the recipe called for, but it certainly wasn’t the kind I used! My food processor saved the day, and with its noble help, I was able to pull everything together in the end. I’m going to give you instructions to make this the way I would make it with packets of yeast. It should all go smoothly from there. It’s supposed to be made in a ring-shaped mold, but I don’t have one, so I used a regular cake pan. Apparently you can use rum, kirsch or curacoa. I’d like to have used kirsch, but I don’t have any, so I used a bit of rum, a bit of cassis.

Here’s Django Reinhardt with Nuages
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Cherry chocolate coconut almond crisp

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Cherry clafouti crisp

Here at The Ordinary, in our illustration division (located in a spacious and sunny atrium between the rooftop greenhouse and the outdoor swimming pool in the parpapets) we like to draw mixed up animals. You can find us hard at work, day and night, combining winged creatures, finned creatures and those with claws and tails. The best part of this fantastical exercise, is that the resulting mixed up creature is usually quite delightful. Let us present a few choice examples from our archives…
Malcolm’s fox-owl.

Isaac’s Ring-tailed Ouzel

Ring tailed ouzel

And my squirrel-giraffe

Squirrel giraffe

This dessert is a mixed up animal, too! Part cobbler, part crisp, part frangipane, part clafoutis. It’s fruity, soft, chocolatey, and crispy all at the same time! Here’s how it all went down: I had bought a bag of cherries. In general, cherries don’t last long in this house. However, we went away twice for a few days within a week or two, and before we knew it, the cherries were past their first blush of youth. Well! A chance to bake!! I wanted to make a cobbler/crisp type dessert. I also had clafoutis on my mind (the french cherry & baked custard dish) – specifically I was thinking about clafoutis with a frangipane type of custard. This combines all of those things. We have a layer of warm cherries splashed with rum, a layer of soft baked almond custard with bittersweet chocolate chips, and a crispy coconut topping. If I do say so, and I do, this is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made! It has a lot of different flavors, it’s true, but they all go very nicely together. We ate it warm with lightly whipped cream flavored with maple syrup and vanilla.

Here’s The Kangaroo Rat from the Beastie Boys. I know that’s an actual animal, but they look so unlikely (perfect, but unlikely!) And the album is called the mix-up, so it’s double extra good.

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French cake a week # 2- Gateau Suisse

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Gateau suisse

Today I made a cake. Or it might have been yesterday. I don’t really know or care. And then I sat in a dead tree and ate it, and looked up at the sky flowing over head. And when I fed it to the boys, they gobbled it down, like Gargantua and Pantagruel. And I thought, the cake looks like the moon. The moon! That’s the place for me, my kind of paradise. And then I went outside to cultivate my own garden. And I cried, “this is absurd, and none of it matters, so I will bake cakes!” Cakes cakes cakes, every week, to show the benign tediousness of life as it goes on day to day and week to week. And we will become accustomed to the sameness, and learn to find it interesting. And then we will eat the cakes. Cakes, cakes, cakes.

Can you tell that I took French literature in high school? Yup. The other week, as you may recall, I made a gateau au chocolat de Nancy from my Cuisine moderne et vieilles recettes, (1962 edition). As we sat in the yard on a pleasant summer evening, scarfing down chocolate cake and red wine, David said that he liked french cakes, and I should make one a week. I’m up for the challenge. So, from now on, I will be baking a cake from my french cookbook, one a week. I don’t speak french very well, and the recipes tend to be quite short and mysteriously written, and in measurements that are foreign to me (get it?) so the results may be mixed. We’ll consider the gateau au chocolat de nancy the first cake, so this gateau suisse will be the second. I think I made it wrong, and Americanized it, because it called for grated chocolate, to be mixed in till the whole thing was smoothly chocolatey. I like little melty bits of chocolate, so I used chocolate chips, and processed them till some were powder, but some were still fairly large chunks. Thus, I made more of a chocolate chip cake than a chocolate cake. It came out very well though! Very simple and pleasing. The boys beg to eat it for breakfast.

The series begins! There will be more cakes!! Watch this space!

Here’s Colettte Magny with Melocoton. It’s beautiful!!
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Le gateau au chocolat de Nancy with blackberry-cassis sauce

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Le gateau au chocolat Nancy

We went blackberry picking yesterday. We get a boxed share of vegetables from our CSA, but part of the deal is that we can go to the farm and pick certain crops. This week it’s blackberries. Of course I got lost on the way there, following a detour it turned out I didn’t need to make. Picture me, if you will, driving in circles on beautiful but bewildering country roads, with two little boys in the back seat, and me up front, cursing my head off. The boys meekly suggested that we just go home, and I yelled, “we’ve been driving for hours so we could get one **$*#$ pint of blackberries, we are not going home without our pint of *$#*&$** blackberries!” Yeah, they’ll have glowing memories of lazy summer days with mom. So, almost by accident, we found the farm. We walked across dry and blistering fields to the long rows of blackberry bushes. And then it was really nice. The bushes made a bit of shade, there was a warm, blackberry-smelling wind blowing all along the hedges. The boys ate berries right from the vine, the bees and butterflies danced dizzily all around us, but weren’t interested in us at all. The thing about picking blackberries on a farm is that many many people have picked before you, so it can be hard to find the ripe fruit. You could, in theory, find yourself having a cross and panicky moment in which you think about how long it took you to get there, and how you’ll go home with a pint of sour red berries, which you tugged, unripe from the bush in grudging anger. And then bright little Isaac said, “Mom, look down here! There are millions.” And truly, when I crouched down and looked up at the world from Isaac’s point of view, the bushes were teeming with ripe fruit. I reached my hand into the fragrant green spaces the leaves made, and the berries literally fell, with gentle little thuds, to the ground. We had our pint in no time, but we kept walking to the end of the row, where it was lovely and shady by the wooded edge of the farm, and we stopped to rest there a moment before the hot march back. And I thought about how everything in life is probably better if you look at it from Isaac’s point of view.

Blackberry picking

For some reason I felt determined to bake yesterday, and I felt determined to bake with chocolate. I’d been reading my French cookbook from the 60s. I don’t really like to follow recipes, but this cookbook is different, because I don’t really speak French, and because it doesn’t really spell out how to make the recipe in a step by step way. So it’s like solving a puzzle. I’m not sure I made this cake correctly, but it turned out delicious! It has lots of butter, chocolate and eggs, and 1 tablespoon of flour and a smicker of ground almonds. It’s dense, but light, soft, flavorful. We ate half the blackberries fresh, and we turned the rest into a sauce with cassis and sugar. The blackberries and the sauce were quite tart, but I thought they went well with the sweet chocolatey cake.

Blackberry sauce

Here’s Jeanne Moreau singing Le Tourbillon, which always sounds like summer passing too fast, to me.
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