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A Gateau Breton Story: In Partnership with Vermont Creamery
I know the value of nourishment now. I used to smoke cigarettes until I got sick. I drank coffee and added packets of sugar to make it bearable. I ate pizza in my college mini fridge and ignored phone calls from my dad when he said he missed me.
I know what nourishment is now, to be mindful of the present. To pick quality. To say sorry. To spend time with my family, to remember birthdays and anniversaries and baby showers. I’m spending the week at my parents’ home in North Carolina, with my uncles and aunts and cousins from Indiana. I’m different than I was when I saw them last—at a grandfather’s funeral or at an obligatory Christmas in middle school. I’m different because I laugh more now; I can’t take life so seriously. I got a beer for my cousin who looks like me and we each took a drag on my brother-in-law’s Pall Mall.
It’s something I needed, to grow up. To try a little harder than what I was used to. I see the world in its potential rather than through my obsession with opportunity. Its potential to reincarnate itself into a thousand manifestations of God and God is a thousand manifestations of endeavor.
Trial and error.
Forgiveness.
I made this cake before I left. I kept it simple. I kept it about quality, about the ingredients I had in my pantry. I made a gateau breton, more shortbread than cake. A performance of cultured butter and confectioner’s sugar. A dance between countryside fever dreams and beach-going haze. A nod to my vacation with rum-soaked cherries. A dessert that lasts for days and is gone in minutes. Like respect, like quality, like forgiveness.
Cultured Butter Gateau Breton with Rum-Soaked Cherries
Adapted from Nigella Lawson's gateau breton recipe, with rum-soaked cherries and a tanginess of cultured butter with a high quality product from Vermont Creamery.
Ingredients
- ¼ cup dried cherries
- 2 TB coconut rum (or any rum or whiskey you may enjoy)
- 1 ½ c AP flour
- 2 tablespoon cornstarch
- ¾ cup white sugar
- Pinch of salt
- ¾ cup culture butter, softened
- 7 egg yolks, separated
- 1 TB vanilla extract
- ½ teaspoon grated ginger
- Zest of 1 lemo
Directions
- In a small bowl, soak cherries and rum and let sit
- Prepare an 8-inch springform pan (or cake pan, if you don’t have a springform pan…no need to stress over it) with butter and parchment paper
- Preheat oven to 375*F
- In the bowl of the stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, sift together flour, cornstarch, salt, and sugar
- Add butter and mix on medium-low. Batter will be crumbly
- Begin adding 6 of your yolks, one at a time. Add the subsequent yolk once previous is fully mixed
- Add zest, ginger, and vanilla. Mix for a few seconds to fully incorporate
- With a sieve, drain cherries
- Fold cherries into the batter (note that the batter will be thick and sticky)
- With floured hands, pat the batter into the prepared pan and smooth out the top with a wetted spoon
- Now, with your seventh egg yolk, mix with a tablespoon of water and spread this glaze atop the batter
- Cut a diagonal pattern into the batter and sprinkle with a small amount of sugar
- Bake for 15 minutes at 375*F; reduce oven to 350*F and continue baking for an additional 25-30 minutes (begin checking at the 25 minute mark)
- Let cool completely and remove from pan. This is a hardy cake and will do well with a little confectioner’s sugar and perhaps a squeeze of lemon
- Cut on your diagonals to serv
Equinox.
There are cold sweats at night and hot coffee by morning. It's never enough to say "enough". Disappointments, like weeds, grow tenfold when you cut then down to the nub. Down to the quick, where it hurts in the white part. Sometimes I bite my nails when I'm going 80 on the highway. Sometimes I'm moody to the point of tempestuous. Sometimes I think of the old farmhouse where I grew up and can't remember what my room looked like as a kid. My life is halved like an apple, quartered like a treasonous man. Dragged on the back of horses, pieces of me left in all cardinal directions. There was only pre-California and post-California. And now there is only California. And maybe that's all there has ever been, the confusing realization that time moves languid when you want it to speed up. You close your eyes and you're 23 and not who you thought you'd be. The bits of synchronistic twang to your voice when you call your mother fades when you order dinner. The dog hair I found on a sweater last week was not from the fourteen-year-old lab I grew up with. It's the realization that who you are now is who you'll be forever and these relics of age and memory somehow clashed. A little more Big Sur, a little less Appalachia.
The two years I've lived in California haven't seemed that long at all. It's due to the stagnation of perfect weather. The dry summers, the fog-colored mornings when the light refracts on silky palm leaves. It somehow mummified my senses. I've lived in a sarcophagus of privilege. The summers can trick you into thinking you're happy, you're at peace. It makes you drowsy to the point of opiated calmness. It's only here that I've experienced this effect. Here, where the weather never changes.
In Pennsylvania, life is marked by natural disasters. Things insurance doesn't cover. Floods that come from mountaintops, drowning any cornfields near your schoolyard. Snow storms that caused your mother to slip and break her tailbone. "The Summer after that big storm..." was my graduation date. "That one Spring when the tree broke in half..." was when my grandfather died. Life is punctuated by nature, and nature is constant, dynamic shifting of lunar phases and cloud formations.
But in California, it's quiet at night. It doesn't rain. It just gets hotter and cooler, variations of the same eternal summer. It can be a stifling feeling to never know when the storm comes and the clouds all look like shapes from your childhood. Here, you never have any way to keep track of time. Clocks lie. What says an hour can feel like three in a fight. A month can shed its skin and stretch to be sixty days instead of thirty. Time is perspective in California. Happiness is all perspective, too. I can see why Eve ate the apple.
On our nightly dog walks, we find small pomegranates instead.
These are the reasons I miss the fall, the liminal seasons before and after the Persphonic bookends of the year--summer and winter. When there's nothing but continuity, there's no way to reflect on two whole years of my life. Fall means a time of transition, evidence of change. It's up to me to decide if that means progress. I lose sight of the small victories when there's nothing but sunshine.
So I made this apple tart. A "rustic apple tart", as Leite's Culinaria called it. I thought about every autumnal mid-afternoon when I'd come home to a pumpkin pie or a lit candle. My mother had made my bed and kept the window opened, just to keep it as crisp-smelling as possible. I made this tart and blushed at how simple it was. I made this tart and called my mom, because what else can you do when you're wondering if she remembers things the way you do.
