Galette

NATIONAL FRENCH CAKE OR GALETTE. Dearest Eloise,— There is one little and perhaps insignificant French cake, which I feel certain would soon become a favourite in the cottage, more particularly amongst its juvenile inhabitants. It is the famed galette, the melodramatic food of the gamins, galopins, mechanics, and semi-artists of France.

Young Turnip Galette with Cardamom. A galette can be any manner of flat, round cake or tart. In this case, it is an exquisite arrangement of buttery-thin turnip slices, glazed and sealed together in an overlapping pattern like the surface of a fine apple tart.

Apricot Galette. A galette is a rustic, free-form fruit tart, baked directly on a lined baking sheet rather than in a tart pan. Some galettes are made with puff pastry, others with yeast dough, and yet others with sweet tart or pastry dough.

Kings' Cake/Galette des Rois. […] Created to celebrate Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, the day the Three Kings visited the infant Jesus, the galette should probably appear only on Epiphany, January 6, but knowing something wonderful when they see (and taste) it, Parisians have made the galette des rois a month-long indulgence. The word galette can mean many things[…], among them a crêpe; a small savory pancake (think potato pancake); a cookie, usually a butter cookie from Brittany; or a round thick but not particularly high cake, like the kings' cake. The galette des rois is two rounds of puff pastry filled with a mixture of almond cream and pastry cream.

We skipped dessert and walked down through the raindrops to a bake-shop to sample the flat Breton galette, made of sugar, eggs, butter, and flour […]

GALETTES BRETONNES AU SARRASIN. BRETON BUCKWHEAT GALETTES. The filling for a paper-thin Breton galette is always simple. The most popular, called a complet, includes ham and egg and often a spoonful of fresh cheese. You can ask for the egg to be brouillé, briskly scrambled on the hot galette, or miroir, left untouched to bake on top. When the galette is pleated, the golden egg yolk peeps out of the crisp brown folds.

You want a breton galette (cancalaise made up of scallops, smoked bacon and mushrooms cream is a real delight ...), pancakes like the delicious "Bzh" with homemade salted butter, homemade crumble and toasted almonds – note that the specialities are made from organic breton flour.