Weekend baking project: Galette des Rois

'Tis the season for this magnificent cake

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Every year on the first Sunday following January 1st, the Christian feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit of Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar (a.k.a. the Three Kings) to the baby Jesus, takes place. As January 1st fell on a Sunday this year, Epiphany is celebrated on Sunday, January 8th, a day many a French citizen will head to their local pâtisserie or boulangerie to pick up a Galette des Rois.

A magnificent Galette des Rois from Montreal’s Café Bazin.

Though tied to an official date, the "Galette des Rois"is eaten throughout January and sometimes even at the end of December when bakers and pastry chefs often sneak it in amongst the Christmas logs for the New Year. But for the French, the Galette des Rois is more than just a way for pastry chefs to make a little money before the dead season post X-mas. It’s also a family tradition where the person who ends up with the bean or trinket (often a porcelain revolutionary figures) baked inside is given the title of king or queen for the day and gets to wear the paper crown sold with the cake. Good times! I’m even told it’s big in offices where colleagues share a friendly, post-holiday moment before getting back to the grind.

I learned to make these galettes in cooking school, though we called them pithiviers. They consisted of puff pastry layers sandwiched with almond cream, and the fun part was making the elaborate design overtop and around the edge. I hadn’t made one for decades but last year I tried my hand at it again using homemade puff pastry.

A magnificent galette made with homemade puff pastry.

This year, though, I wanted to come up with a recipe for a galette using store-bought puff pastry. Puff pastry takes a lot of skill and patience to make properly, so I like the idea of buying it ready-made. The important part is to find ALL-BUTTER pastry or your galette won’t taste of much. I would highly recommend purchasing puff pastry in a bakery (in Montreal I’ve found good-quality, frozen puff pastry at Première Moisson, Au Pain Doré and Mamie Clafoutis). I recently came upon a box of 2, 9-inch (23 cm) puff pastry rounds from the company Carrément Tarte, for about $8.50. Expensive, yes, but there’s no denying the convenience, and the results were pretty good, though not as good as homemade.

I developed this recipe using those rounds and to help guide you, here is a video I made on Instagram:

lesleychestrman

A post shared by Lesley Chesterman (@lesleychestrman)

A few extra notes on this recipe:

— If using homemade, start with about a lb (454 g) of dough, and consider making it a bit larger, to say 10-inches (25 cm), which is prettier. And be sure to give the dough a good rest after you make your pastry rounds, to make sure it doesn’t shrink too much when baking.

— For the filling, you can change the type of nut used by grinding the same weight of nuts as the almond flour listed below in a blender or food processor along with the icing sugar, but do not blend it too much or the nuts will get oily. I like making a pistachio filling in a 2 part pistachio and 1 part almond mix. Always be sure your nuts are fresh.

— Before baking, the galette can be frozen, well-wrapped, for a good month, but be sure to add about 10 minutes to the baking time

At this point your galette can be wrapped and frozen for future enjoyment.

If you aren’t up to making a galette, you can certainly buy them around town, my favourites being at Café Bazin and Pâtisserie Rhubarbe.

And on a final note: I don’t bother with the bean or trinket baked into the galette, but if you use a bean, be sure to warn your guests before serving. And if you don’t remember to bake it into the galette, rest assured, you can also make a slit in the bottom of the galette and slip it in once baked.

Galette des Rois

Serves 6