My family has a somewhat new holiday tradition. Rather than eating the whole meal at one apartment, we have different courses at different places with the opportunity to get a bit of air and movement between each course. I get to end the evening by hosting the dessert course. This year, the dessert menu had goat cheesecakes with poached figs (recipe is in the blog), various cookies, and chocolate mousse. The dessert which took the most thought, and was the most fun to plan, was the Gateau Épicé with chocolate ganache. In fact, I woke up on Christmas Eve morning with the realization that a thin layer of red currant jelly on the cake would complement the chocolate and spices nicely.

People often ask me how I developed an interest in cooking. I grew up watching my mom navigate 1960s suburban and rural grocery stores so that she could try out the occasional recipe from her Larousse Gastronomique. I watched her bake pies, cook stews, make jam, and bake an occasional torte. I am just finishing Mashama Bailey’s MasterClass. One of the aspects of her cooking story is how deeply connected she is to her early experiences around food being prepared by her mother and grandmother. Baking desserts around the holidays gives me a connection to my mother’s kitchen.

This spice cake recipe comes from a French cookbook, Desserts Faciles aux Chocolat, published by Artemis Editions. I have had this book for a number of years and decided to try out this recipe this year. Challenges included translating the recipe from French and baking and frosting a cake with a broken wrist. Pleasures include the cake (very tasty) and teaching my daughter how to cut cake layers like my mom taught me.

There are some differences in how the recipes in this book are written. First, all measurements are metric. My kitchen scale and Google came in handy. Second, there was no indication of what size cake pan to use besides the note that it serves 4 and the scale of items in the photo made it seem small. I baked one recipe and realized I would need to bake another in order to layer the cake at all. I have doubled this recipe. Third, many French cake recipes use whipped egg whites as leavening. There is no baking soda or baking powder in this recipe.

Gateau épicé

ingredients

60 g flour

200 g almond flour

4 eggs and 6 egg whites

100 g powdered sugar

80 g butter, melted

4 tablespoons honey

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp cardamom

1/4 tsp star anise

1/4 tsp salt

For the ganache use 200 g bittersweet chocolate, 1 tablespoon rum, and 200 g creme fraiche

Red currant jelly

Heat the oven to 395. Grease 2 8-inch springform pans, line the bottom with parchment paper, and dust with flour.

Beat the whole eggs with the powdered sugar until it lightens. Then add the honey, the almond flour, the flour, the melted butter, and the spices. Stir until all is moistened.

in a separate bowl whip the 6 egg whites until stiff peaks form. Delicately incorporate the egg whites into the cake batter. Do this in stages folding the egg whites into the batter. Do not overmix. Divide the batter between the two pans and bake for about 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven and cake pans and let cool.

Prepare the ganache. Heat the creme fraiche to almost boiling. Pour the hot cream with rum over the chopped-up chocolate. Stir to melt the chocolate. and then whip until it is smooth and let cool.

To assemble the cake, cut each layer in half so you have two disks each. My mother’s trick for this was to cut the edge of the cake with a serrated knife and then use a length of sewing thread to cut the cake in half.

I used a couple of tablespoons of red currant jelly on each layer except the top before frosting with a thin layer of ganache.