A simple French cake for beginners. Quatre-quart cake

Northeast 5 to 7.

Slight or moderate.

Thundery showers.

Good, occasionally poor.

Sometimes it takes three things to go back into blogging after a break:

A request

Need for comfort

A challenge

My Dad died last week (see last entry). Since then I am eating like there is no tomorrow, but I don’t care what I am eating. I just throw things together and, if it fails to taste nice, there is always Srichia.

But I did miss cooking. Cooking is for me more than preparing something to eat, but it is difficult to get yourself excited about cooking if you don’t care what you eat.

Nevertheless I got restless. A crucial part in my life was missing. I was still looking at other food blogs but nothing captured my interest. Until I visited “Bloggers around the World” again. 

Chris sends us this month to France. 

LA FRANCE! FRONKREICH, FRONKREICH!

And that was the tipping point:

In need of comfort food? Check!

My last request (technically more have come up but I will deal with them in the next weeks), check.

A challenge? Check!

So it is going to be THE CAKE. The beginner`s cake. The simple cake. The cake with only four ingredients. The Quatre-Quart from Brittany. It is quite easy to make as long as you follow three rules:

1. You need a scale

2. You need only four ingredients (hence “four quarter cake”), but there are a few exceptions.

3. It only works with the best of ingredients, like all simple cakes.

Before I explain these rules, let me first tell you what you can expect in the end: A light, buttery, salty and sweet cake, a bit like a sponge cake. I don’t think it is a cake for a cup of tea, but it works like a dream with hot chocolate or a sweet wine like a Gewuerztraminer. It does not have a complex taste, but if you can get excited about freshly baked bread topped with the best of butter alone, this cake is for you.

It also works well not only with butter and jam, but also with a bit of cheese on top. Something like a Roquefort.

But now to the rules:

1. The American volume system doesn’t work here. Yes, there is a similar cake called pound cake which works with cups, but this here has a slightly different dough. You weigh your eggs (or egg), with the shell (!), make a note of the weight and all three other ingredients should be measured to the same weight. My first attempt on downscaling involved one egg at 67gr, so I added 67gr of butter, 67gr of flour and 67gr of sugar.

2. The four ingredients are egg, butter, flour and sugar. The allowed exceptions are: a pinch of salt for beating the egg white, a pinch of baking powder (it is NOT necessary but, if you have a not so perfect oven and/or feel nervous, allowed) and finally flavouring. Again, this is not necessary, the cake is perfect as it is, and in its simplicity will be a perfect canvas for other food, but if you feel adventurous  feel free to add a hint of vanilla extract, sauternes, lemon zest or (very nice) orange blossom water. Only a hint though, or you change the balance of liquids.

3. The quality of ingredients is important. Most notable the butter. French (and other Continental) butter use a different maturing technique. It results in a far more complex butter taste, both in the salted and unsalted variety. If you never had it before, you first taste of butter from Brittany or the Normandy is something which you will not forget. Furthermore they contain more salt than UK or Irish butter. While the latter two have a max of 2% salt, the butter from Brittany has 3%. And it is either coarse sea salt or “fleur du sel”.

The best butter available in a UK supermarket is the Reflets de France Guerande Salted Butter. If you can’t get it (or any other salted butter from Brittany), use the best quality butter you can afford and add some more sea salt crystals so it reaches 3%.

I personally like to use fine sugar (icing sugar), albeit caster sugar is fine. It just makes it a tad less grainy.

And since fine cake flour is a bit tricky to get, why not use the pasta (00) flour?

Nearly there, but before I go to the recipe let`s talk about portion size here. I made it twice. The first time with just a hen egg (67gr) and the overall dough filled nearly 4 of these mini cake tins. 

I then did it again with 2 quail eggs (together 29gr). The amount filled one tin and was thus perfect, but it was nearly impossible to get this small amount of egg white stiff. In the end I stopped at the soft peak stage and resorted to a pinch of baking powder. My advice: treat yourself and have more cakes. They keep a bit and if they get stale, why not make a Pain Perdu with the rest?

Quatre-Quart cake

1 egg

same amount of salted butter, flour and sugar as the weight of the whole egg (including shell).

Optional:

a pinch of salt

a pinch of baking powder

a hint of flavouring

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Separate the egg into egg yolk and white.

Cream the very soft butter with the sugar, but don’t overbeat it. You want to retain a bit of the sea salt crystals. Add the egg yolk, mix, and add the sieved flour and a pinch of baking powder if you want to use it. Mix. Beat the egg white to the firm peak stage and fold into the batter.

Fill into a silicone mould and bake in the oven between 15 to 20 minutes. Be careful in the last 5 minutes, it goes quickly from not yet quite done to over-baked and too brown.

Let it cool and serve with a nice glass of Gewuerztraminer

or even with a nice cold Pineau des Charentes

Happy baking and remember...