Pearls, Curls & French Cuisine – Chapter 6: Biscuit au Beurre

Siiri
Jun 8
3 min read

Updated: Jun 17

Dearest reader,

One of the greatest pleasures in life is baking an excellent cake when there is no real reason for it. It is called: the undying apetite for all things sweet and spongy, also known as, the birthday cake syndrome, and, as you can imagine, I am a VIP member of that group. That is why, I naturally had to learn how to make a French cake (any French cake!) according to our very own Julia Child who, thankfully, has included five different cake recipes in her cookbook, one being biscuit au beurre.

So I put on my pearls,

tied back my curls and

opened page 562 of

Mastering The Art Of French Cooking

The Process of Biscuit au Beurre

If you didn't get the idea yet, I LOVE cakes, but when it came to choosing which one of the five I should do first, I decided to go for the one that I had the ingredients for and seemed most simple since I had never done this particular recipe before. Namely, none of the five cakes require baking poweder to rise which was an intriquing feature of the whole cake making to me.

What you need for biscuit au beurre are:

butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, salt and flour

As I understood it, biscuit au beurre is basically your standard vanilla cake you can serve with almost any toppings available. The cake rises by the power of whipped egg whites which you fold (or mélanger) into the cake batter together with flour. Guided by the magic of eggs the cake really did rise beautifully in the oven due to this technique and didn't fall flat afterwards. Very pleasing, indeed!

While my first ever biscuit au beurre was cooling down I, however, sat down to think about how to serve the cake? Luckily, Julia had suggestions which included a series of glazes, fruits and butter based fillings. Needless to say, I went for the easiet options which were a sucre glace (a dusting of powdered sugar), fresh strawberries and an elegant pouring of rhubarb sauce (recipe not included in Mastering the Art of French cooking).

A composition of vanilla cakes with strawberries. — I made a small, glutein free cake for my sister and it turned out just as well (if not better) as the normal cake.

The Result

As anticipated, the final biscuit au beurre experience was simply delighful. It's certainly one of those uncomplicated recipes that you can manipulate into whatever it is you fancy from fruity flavors to buttery softness. Of course, I must make more of these cakes now because this one was devoured in record time, and I so adore having a slice of something spongy.

Moreover, don't you agree that cakes have that warming, deeply comforting quality to them as if to say: you're safe, have some cake! and then you do and it's so much fun. Perhaps, even the world would be a much peaceful place if we would just come down from those high horses and gather to share a cake.