Apple Gâteau Breton
An easy, irresistible apple cake for this snowy weekend
Earlier this fall, I filled in for David Lebovitz on his newsletter while he was traveling in Japan. He requested that I share something French, since that’s what his readers expect, so I decided on this apple cake which is an ode to something I had in Brittany the summer before. It was the best dessert I had on my whole trip to France that summer, and it was hard to get it out of my mind!
Perhaps you clicked over there back in November, but in case you missed it, I wanted to make sure this recipe had a home here in the Susanality archive for future reference. So many people immediately made this cake and I got so many comments on how delicious it was. If you missed it, I highly recommend whipping this up!
Here are some of the comments on this recipe:
“I made this for Christmas and it is one of the best apple cakes I’ve ever eaten. The buckwheat on top is ♥️. So much looking forward to making the original recipe in Summer, I live in Germany, with rhubarb.”
“I made it and it was incredible!”
“Made this cake and loved it! I didn’t have buckwheat flour on hand so I used AP. Also subbed the apricot preserves for apple butter. Lovely cake!”
“I made this cake today! A beautiful recipe and a gorgeous, rich result! I felt like a proper pastry chef, lol!!”
A note about the recipe: the layers of batter (it’s really more of a dough) are quite thin, and the cake itself is low-profile, but this led some bakers to think they were doing something wrong, until they took it out of the oven to see that everything worked out beautifully. Make sure to divide the dough evenly, and try not to use more than half of it when doing the first layer so you have enough to top it off.
I wrote about our trip to Brittany here on Susanality two summers ago. If you want to read about it, here’s the post. One of the things I featured was a pair of delicious pastries from Grain de Vanille, the pastry shop in Cancale owned by the Roellinger family. One was the platonic ideal of the Kouign-amann, which is the pastry Brittany is most famous for. The other was a somewhat untraditional version of Gâteau Breton that was topped with crunchy toasted buckwheat and had a layer of stewed rhubarb in the center. I’ve been using toasted buckwheat in my cooking and baking for a few years now, so I really felt like I had found my people when I saw how popular it was there. We even had it on top of oysters on our first night there. Later I found out that it was a special spice blend sold at Epices Roellinger: a twist on Japanese gomasio, but made with buckwheat groats instead of the traditional sesame seeds. You can bet I brought some of that home with me—it’s good on just about everything.
Anyway, back to the cake. I decided to reverse engineer that delicious, buttery cake that’s been lingering in my memory, but with an apple filling for fall. I hate to brag, but I think I nailed it. It was exactly what I was going for. I decided to use some buckwheat flour in the cake batter too, along with that irresistible crunchy topping, and a filling of caramelized apples in the center. It’s everything I want an apple cake to be, including easy to make. It’s the sort of cake you can leave on the counter for a couple of days, slicing off a bit wherever you have the urge. It will last even longer in the fridge, and it freezes just fine too, if it lasts that long!
In other news:
Adam Roberts interviewed me for The Amateur Gourmet on Substack about my time on the set of Julie & Julia. He is doing a book club, and they are reading the original novel by Julie Powell.
I’ve been enjoying Pete Wells’ series on how he reset his appetite and lost 50 pounds in the process after leaving his position as chief restaurant critic for The New York Times. This week is about mindful eating and grocery shopping.
