Gâteau Breton

I had fun baking a fabulously simple gâteau the other day. I should confess that it was  emphatically not vegan (we’re trying to eat vegan more often than not). Yes, we fell spectacularly off the vegan wagon and landed with a buttery splash onto a vegetarian one. I feel a bit bad about that. But I do have to say this is one delicious gâteau and, well, if you’re going to use butter, then really use butter.

It felt like baking would be a good idea on a rainy, grey day – those warm, comforting aromas that emanate from an oven are like substitute sunshine – and chose a recipe from Mimi Thorisson’s French Country Cooking, her second cookbook. I love her books, they’re full of lovely recipes (no surprise there) and fabulous photographs but also great vignettes of how she and her family bought and renovated a big old house in a small French village and their adventures with their pop-up restaurant. I love how their lifestyle and work has positively affected the local businesses and economy, it’s an inspiring story that she also recounts in her wildly successful blog Manger, which needs no introduction from me.

The amount of butter? 16 tablespoons, or 225g, or approximately 1 cup depending on where you are. And lots of eggs and some dark rum. I can’t repeat the whole recipe I’m sure without permission, but you get the idea. It was delicious. And rich. And a very little goes a long long way. Gratifyingly my gâteau ended up looking very like the photo of the one in the cookbook. This doesn’t always happen, to me at least, so it’s nice when it does.

So after a long day of amazing snowshoeing a little over a week ago (the weather is far from spring here still)…..

It’s really nice to still have a little of the gâteau left to munch on….

Sometimes cooking is a chore, but sometimes, ummm, not so much.