Best laid plans and all that. This month I really wanted to be part of baking from The Perfect Cake cookbook and the choices sounded great...well except for the Crepe Cake...I'm forever scarred by making a Martha Stewart crepe cake with the Daring Bakers years ago. What I hadn't counted on was the one-two punch of an auto accident followed by the flu in short order. When the flu got me I had already gotten out the blender to start the recipe and had lemon juice squeezed...and then it all sat on the counter for a week until today. The lemon juice had spoiled of course, so I just squeezed more and then set about making the Gateau Breton, which is a delightful French butter cake with an apricot filling. It is rather like a pound cake in texture, but still moist and tender. The filling has a lovely apricot flavor and the cake has some rum, some vanilla, and (my addition) a touch of almond extract since it brings out the apricot flavor so well.
This is a fairly easy cake to make but you have to be patient. First the apricot filling is cooked, then cooled. The cake batter is divided in half, with the first half being set in the pan in the freezer for 10 minutes to firm it up for the addition of the filling. Then the filling is frozen the same amount of time and the second half of the batter is spread on top. I love creating the pattern with an egg yolk wash and fork tines. I used a farm egg from our neighbors, so the yolk was really, really orange!
I very much like this cake. It's not too rich or too sweet. Since the area of Brittany in France uses salt in their butter it was strange to use unsalted, but I used fleur de sel from France instead of table salt for the salt in the recipe, which worked well...every once in a while a bite would have a nice nugget of saltiness.
Unfortunately I missed the deadline to post as part of the Cake Slice Bakers so the inserted text below isn't true...there are no linked sites with the other bakers. Turns out that this month the two favorites were this Gateau Breton and the Wellesley Fudge Cake. Hope to be on time next month! Have not typed this recipe up yet and probably won't now that the mail has come.
My copy of the book just arrived today, after I had baked the cake...it is an amazing compendium of almost any cake you might want to bake. I was honored to have been able to bake some of the recipes before the book came out. This book is clearly a keeper...and I have dozens and dozens of recipes to try from it yet & cn still say that. It looks like the kind of cookbook that you would choose if you knew you could only have one cake baking book on your deserted island. Of course that island would need a stove, lots of baking supplies and tools, so how deserted would it be anyway?
Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through. This year it is The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen #atkcake. We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cakes!
Follow our Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest pages where you can find all of our cakes, as well as inspiration for many other cakes. You can also click on the thumbnail pictures below to take you to each of our cakes, or visit our blog where the links are updated each month. If you are interested in joining The Cake Slice Bakers and baking along with us, please send an email to thecakeslicebakers at gmail dot com for more details.
The choices this month were Wellesley Fudge Cake, Tahini-Banana Snack Cake, Hazelnut-Chocolate Crepe Cake, and Gateau Breton.
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