TWD - Gateau Basque Fantasie

For the last Tuesday with Dorie this month, the recipe is Gateau Basque Fantasie.  A fantasie is a dish not made strictly in accordance with tradition.  Normally, a Gateau Basque is filled with pastry cream or cherry jam.  Here, it is filled with lashings of fruit and nuts instead.

The filling ingredients that I used were fresh orange segments, orange juice, ginger, apples, red grapes, dried apricots and toasted almonds.  I loved the bitterness of the orange, the crunch of the almonds, the chewiness of the apricots and the sweetness of the apples and grapes.

The pastry for this Gateau did not give me any hassles when making it, as experienced by some of my fellow Dorie bakers.  Where I got grief with this Gateau was in unmoulding it from the cake tin in which it was baked.  Up to that point, everything went to plan.  Come unmoulding time, the gateau cracked, as is apparent in the photo at the top of this post.  This did not detract one iota from the taste, but made it much more difficult to serve in an elegant manner.

As for the taste, this gateau is devine.  The buttery, sweet, biscuit-like pastry is the perfect foil for the fruit inside.  If you can live with a little cracking and untidiness in the pastry, then this is a wonderful dish to make.  It would be great to make it over and over with different seasonal fruits, as suggested by Dorie.

To see what the others made this week and how they felt about it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.