In 1995, when I was living in Brittany, someone introduced me to a French Christmas tradition. It was the serving of a cake on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, and the cake was called Galette des Rois. Mostly it comes with a little bean or figure in it called the feve, and a bit like our saga with the ring in the Halloween Brack, there are certain traditions associated with what happens if your piece has the bean in it. I seem to remember something about making the youngest person in the house hide under the table while the cake is being cut as well. I really can’t remember the details now. But I think if you find the bean in your slice, you have to wear the crown that comes with the cake and be king for a year.
Any French supermarket is full of these things in and around Christmas but our 6 January traditions are very different here – the whole little Christmas or Woman’s Christmas is observed to a greater or lesser extent depending on where you are although the Women’s Christmas thing is spreading outwards from Cork, causing more debate. Outside Cork, it seems as though the reward was not to have to do the cleaning, in Cork, the women feck off out for a party. Cork wins, I think.
Meanwhile, twitter yesterday did feature some debate about true equality versus one day off in the year. I’ve mixed feelings about that whole discussion so didn’t contribute.
In the meantime, there’s this Galette thing that I loved, and loved and loved in 1995 and really wished I could have more of. Any time I have been in France at the material time I have not been in so much of a position to bring it back. But about 6 years ago I bought a book called Bien Cuisiner by Marie-Claude Bisset. It’s a fantastic cookbook if you speak French and I am pretty certain that three other people here in Ireland bought copies on the strength of fingering my copy. There is a new edition out here and it costs something like 25E on amazon.fr. Anyway, I figured if I were lucky there would be a recipe in it for a Galette des Rois and if it didn’t look like too much hassle, I’d give it a shot. It did. On page four hundred and something.
It turned out to be remarkably easy. It requires puff pastry which you can buy in the freezer section of any supermarket. I used Jus Rol and for future reference, it comes in squares not circles.
It requires 200g of ground almonds, 80g of icing sugar, the yolks of 2 eggs and 100g of butter.
And a serving of – well they suggested brandy but I didn’t have any so used rum instead. You mix that all together until it’s very fluffy.
Meanwhile, having defrosted the pastry, you roll layer one out, spread the almond cream out on it leaving a frame. Paint the frame with water and then place layer two on top, sticking it at the edges.
Then you paint the top with the yolk of another egg, criss cross it with a knife pattern, and bake it at 220C for about 30 minutes. Possibly less if you’ve a fan oven. After that, you shake some more icing sugar over it and put it back in the oven for 10 minutes.
Then you let it cool. It’s recommended you serve it lukewarm so you really need to let it cook.
I have no idea why for years I thought this might be a complex mess. Possibly because it hadn’t really occurred to me to fake it with the pastry and buy it ready made. This was a complete doddle to make and it came out of the oven almost perfectly. I’d say a touch overdone but it more or less matched the picture in my book; the shop bought ones are a bit more golden rather than oven baked looking.
I didn’t have any feve to put in mine on this occasion; but some American recipes recommend a whole almond in place of the ceramic figure you’ll find in French cakes of the type. That’s probably cheating.
But the cake itself is just amazing. For something so utterly simple, it has turned out wonderfully and I will certainly be doing one every year from here on out.
Post a Comment