The cover of Gateaux shows the Tiered Macaron and Chocolate Mousse Cake. Yes, you can. The recipe is challenging, to be sure, but it is doable. By you.
Authors Christophe Felder and Camille Lesecq are renowned French pastry chef and authors. You may be seen a review here of Patisserie by Felder. That massive work, 800 pages and 3200 photos, gives you a master’s degree in pasty. Gâteaux is the next step. Yes, that Tiered Macaron cake is a Ph.D. pastry wonder.
There are 150 other exceptional treats here in Gâteaux There are large and small cakes, cookies, and fruits fashioned into monumental delicacies. The sugar flows in the book’s eight chapters:
- In One Bite offers cookies in all styles and shapes
- Sunday Brioches has cakes filled with cream as well as tender bread
- Fruit Desserts let berries and more rest atop giant macarons and cakes
- Celebration Cakes are once-in-a-lifetime dessert treasures
- Cakes of the Word applies French elegance to world favorites, like Caramel Brownie Cake
- Tarts are presented with multiple layers and flavors in astonishing array
Just for Fun recipes, like a cake in the shape of a hedgehog, are both fun and funny
Almost every recipe is matched with a deep, full-page color photo graph by Laurent Fau. For complicated recipes, and yes some are really more complicated than others, there are panels of photographs showing you the step-by-step process. This post ends with the photo of the Red Berry Tart, a valuable guide to understanding what “decorate the entire surface with the berries” can mean. It’s not just pasty. It’s art.
These are French recipes but not Paris-centric. Felder is the son of a pastry chef and grew up in Alsace. Lesecq is from Normandy. So there is a wonderful abundance of recipes from the edges of France with some happy German overtones, like the Old-Fashioned Spice Cake.
Fruit and nuts are employed everywhere. In and on these desserts. Consider this sample:
Hazelnut-Vanilla Cookies
Hazelnut-Vanilla Cream Cake [yes, the same combo]
Giant Matcha Madeleine
Lemon Roulade
Mocha Roulade with Arabica Coffee Ice Cream
Pavlova Adorned with Fruit
Pont Neuf Strawberry and Redcurrant Tart
Rum Citrus Bab
Sugar Tart from Northern France
Apple Meringue Tart
Chocolate Banana Cake
Basque Cake with Rum-Flavored Cream
Gateau Olga with Semolina Cake, Almonds, Orange and Raspberries
Yogurt Cake
All the desserts here are enticing. There is a strong variation in the effort and skills require to make them, so you can start with something easy, gain confidence, and graduate to perhaps that book cover cake. The Old-Fashioned Spice Cake and the Yogurt Cake are, for example, recipes any of us could try with full confidence.
Suzi and I started simple with the Hazelnut-Vanilla Cookies. I’ll post our happy results today with the recipe and our picture. The cookies are bite-sized, delectable, and quite unlike anything I have tasted. They are, of course, Alsatian with a German heritage.
Gâteaux is a showstopper cookbook. The photos make it a coffee table book for any foodie. But, the book really belongs right next to your refrigerator. It will remind you to pull out the butter and eggs. And those berries you have stashed away.
While the end results are awe inspiring, each recipe has a careful pathway for to make the ascent. The writing is quite clear. The individual steps are just a sentence or two, so you just cannot get lost on your way to magnificence. Gâteaux is one of those books where you’ll want to make every single thing. One layer at a time.
