May be I was wrong. May be this Gateau Breton really does taste like the Dutch Boterkoek. I guess my hope of finding out the answer relies on the Dutch readers.
On a side note, this is a very good recipe to use up all your egg yolks leftover from making the French Macarons.
Nigella Lawson, "I came across the recipe for Brittany butter cake in the wonderful Anne Willan's Real Food, and as she says, it's really a cross between shortbread and pound cake. Rather like the crostata on page 105 (Nigella Lawson's HTBADG Cookbook), it's hard to decided whether it's cake or pastry. I love a stubby slice of this any time, but it does make a perfect, chic ending to a dinner party, too, either with ice cream or fruit, or if you've already had cheese, just with the coffee that follows.
Anne Willan suggests a kneading motion to bring this very sticky dough into shape; I use the dough hook on my free-standing mixer.
Use the best butter that you can find, for this is the plain cake at its simple best, and the taste of each of these few ingredients is crucial."
Gateau Breton (Brittany Butter Cake) Recipe (Serves 8-10)
(Adapted from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess)
Ingredients
- 225 g plan flour, preferably Italian 00
- 250 g caster sugar
- 250 g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
- 6 large egg yolks
- 25-cm Springform tin, buttered well
For the glaze:
- 1 tsp of egg yolk, from your 6
- 1 tbsp of water
Method
- Preheat the oven to 190C. Mix the glaze, and put aside while you get on with your gateau.
- Put the flour into a bowl (I never bother to sieve 00 flour because it's so finely milled, but if you're using regular plain flour then do so), stir in the sugar and add the butter and egg yolks.
- With the dough-hook attachment of a mixer, slowly whirr till you've got a smooth, golden dough. (If you're making this by hand, make a mound of the flour on a worktop, then make a well in it and add the sugar, butter and eggs and knead to mix.) Scoop this dough into the tin, and smooth the top with a floured hand: expect it to be very sticky; indeed, it should be.
- Brush the gateau with the glaze, and mark a lattice design on top with the prongs of a fork. For a reason I am not technically proficient enough to explain, sometimes the tine marks leave a firm, striated imprint (a bit like the scrapy lines that drive Gergory Peck mad in Spellbound); at others, as with the cake in the picture in the HTBTDG book, they barely show once the cake's cooked. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 180C and give it another 25 minutes or so until it's golden on top and firm to the touch.
- Let it cool completely in the tin before unmoulding it. It'll keep well if you've got a reliably airtight tin. When you come to eat it, either cut it in traditional - though slightly narrower - cake-like wedges or, as I prefer if I'm eating it at the end of dinner, criss-cross, making irregularly sized diamonds.