Regional Butter Cakes

Most people who visit Paris for the first time gain several pounds because they can’t resist the displays of pastry in patisserie windows. Because many of the elaborate gateaux, tartes, and creamy fantasies of classic French pastry-making require years of training to make, most French people buy such desserts at the corner patisserie. Simple cakes and tarts, which I find more satisfying than their sweeter and more elaborate classic cousins, are sometimes made at home. Many regions in France have their own dessert specialties, the most popular of which are simple cakes made with flour, sugar, eggs, plenty of butter, and sometimes yeast and sometimes nuts. Brittany has several such cakes, including the far breton, which has become popular in Paris patisseries. The Parisian version is dome-shaped and black on top, as though it spent too much time in the oven, but in Brittany a far is a kind of sweet porridge, containing raisins or prunes and plenty of eggs, that is baked into what looks like something between a cake and a flan. Breton cooks also make a yeast butter cake, kuoing aman, which is made in much the same way as croissant dough and puff pastry, by rolling out a yeast-leavened dough with butter folded up into it and then continually folding the pastry over itself and rolling so that the number of layers, multiplied by three during each rolling, reaches into the hundreds. A gateau breton is almost identical to pound cake, except that it’s even richer (egg yolks replace the whole eggs), it’s baked in a tart mold, and it has a lattice design on top. In nearby Normandy, a yeast-leavened cake called a fallue, or sometimes a gâche, is made much like brioche except that the dough is folded over itself a couple of times (like puff pastry or croissant dough) and baked into flattened ovals.