Since I've already posted about pastry cream, I won't spend much time on it now. It is worth mentioning, however, that though I commented before that I never saw it reach a creamy salad dressing consistency, this time I did, and I removed the saucepan from the burner at that point. On a practical level it shouldn't have been surprising that the pastry cream would turn out a bit thinner when it was cooked for a slightly shorter period of time, but given that the recipe said to remove from heat at the point of salad dressing, and given that the expectation for pastry cream is for it to be thick, it was a bit unexpected. So, at the risk of winding up with vanilla scrambled eggs, in future I think I'll continue whisking over heat a bit longer.
Anyway, what to do with the pastry cream? My original plan was to make a fruit tart for a cocktail party I was going to, but I was too pressed for time (and feeling too lazy) to make my own tart shell. So I bought one, a cheap one, the first kind I could find in any of my local grocery stores, and I suffered for it. Or rather, my tart suffered for it. The overall effect wasn't terrible (the other party goers said they liked it, but possibly they were being kind, or possibly they'd had more cocktails than me), but it could have been much better. I'd purchased a second shell to fill with the remaining pastry cream, but opted not to use it after the first one. Instead, since the pastry cream was a bit thin, I looked online to see if there was a recipe that involved baking pastry cream. I found the gâteau Basque.
I debated between two recipes, one from NPR and the other from Culinary Concotions by Peabody. The latter was based on a recipe from The American Boulangerie, and I was drawn to it for that reason; the cookbook has a good reputation, and I'm a fan of Bay Area cuisine. NPR's recipe didn't involve separating any more eggs, however, so I went with them instead. Everything about making the dough was straightforward: whisk the dry ingredients (minus the sugars - white and light brown), beat butter and sugars, add eggs, vanilla, dry ingredients... It was the fact that I was making a dough for a cake that was strange. Nevertheless, with the baking powder and the beating of the butter and sugar, it was clear this was no pie crust; it was more like cookie dough.
Both recipes said to split the dough and roll each half out individually between two pieces of saran wrap or parchment paper. Both also said to refrigerate the dough, but disagreed about whether to do this before or after rolling it out. I was impatient and thought with a greater surface area the dough would cool faster, so I rolled it first.
And then I stuck it in the freezer.
I wouldn't recommend leaving the dough in the freezer for long (neither of the recipes recommend it at all), but it worked to firm the dough up quickly, and then I transferred it to the refrigerator for a bit to ensure that it would be workable. If I'd been faster in getting everything else ready I might not have needed to make the transfer at all, but despite being impatient I was operating fairly slowly.
If I had been making a traditional gâteau Basque, with pastry cream or jam alone, I wouldn't have had anything left to prepare. I wanted to take my cue from Peabody, however, and use pastry cream and jam. I like to make things complicated. Especially given that I had no jam. But I had frozen fruit! And though black cherry is the traditional filling, blackcurrant/redcurrant/blackberry/raspberry jam sounded delightful to me.
I use the term 'jam' loosely; I really just adapted the recipe I'd recently used to make coulis, thickening it with more berries, more sugar, less water, a longer cook time, and a tiny bit of cornstarch. It didn't turn out terribly thick, but was perfect for the intended use. It would've also been great for pancakes. Or waffles. It really made me want waffles...
The most difficult part of this whole cake was getting the bottom layer of dough into the cake pan. I wasn't 100% sure about the logistics of doing it for one, and for two I rolled the layer out a bit more after pulling it from the refrigerator, which I think softened and warmed it just a little too much. The dough should be malleable so that it can be formed to the pan, but not so soft that it tears apart when you try to fit it in there. That was an issue for me, worsened, I think, by rolling the layer a little too thin. Over-rolling also meant too much overhang, which caught on the sides of the greased pan as I was trying to lower it in, resulting in small tears on the sides. It wasn't the end of the world though, I simply pressed the tears back together and evened out the overhang, removing the excess. Then I added a layer of my berry concoction, a layer of pastry cream, and the top layer of dough, which I had a much easier time of, having learned from my experiences with the first. Then I carefully unstuck the overhang from the sides of the pan and folded it over the top layer of dough, attempting, with varying degrees of success, to pinch it like a pie crust. I incised the dough in the evidently traditional cross-hatch pattern and baked until golden brown, foregoing the egg wash because, again, separating eggs.
Between the wonky edges and the wash-less... crust? Is it a crust if it's cake? This cake was rustic. It was also lovely. The layers did rise, although not too high, and were soft and a bit crumbly. They weren't dry, although I think they did benefit from the moisture of the pastry cream. Overall it was dense, but not heavy. And it will be repeated.
May the cake cycle continue.
