A cake for total beginners

Brittany’s Quatre Quarts (Four Quarters) cake is a French version of the pound cake – a cake for total beginners and a great place to start if you have no knowledge of baking. All you need is 4 simple ingredients plus one flavouring of your choice.

INGREDIENTS

• Eggs

• Sugar

• Salted butter

• All purpose flour

• Flavouring of your choice

Use around 10ml / 2 teaspoons per egg liquor of choice (Grand Marnier, rum, cognac, kirsch, Cointreau, etc.) Add a teaspoon of grated citrus (optional) or simply use a vanilla extract. You will have to blend it with a bit of milk (same as above, 10ml / 2 teaspoon per egg).

NOTES

• This is one of the many variants of the quatre quarts as everyone tends to add their own twist to it. I recommend trying different versions and see what you prefer. Using baking powder instead of adding beaten egg whites will make the cake less dense. You can also use whole eggs and beat them with the sugar for a long time until they double in volume then continue with the rest of recipe.

• The method: weigh your eggs (out of the shell) and use the same weight for each ingredient in the video. I had 160 grams / 5.6 oz of eggs and I used that same measure all the other ingredient, so 160 grams of sugar, 160 grams of salted butter and 160 grams of all purpose flour. Regardless of how many eggs you use, always base your ingredient measurement on the weight of the eggs.

PROCEDURE

1. Place the almond meal and the sugar into a bowl and blend together with a flat wooden spatula.

2. Pour in the egg whites and use the spatula to first press hard on the mix and then mix together until a paste is formed.

3. Put the paste into a piping bag and pipe it onto a silicon mat in small mounds (For this recipe I used a 1.5cm / ½ inch diameter tip).

4. With a pastry brush, dab water on each mound and gently flatten the mounds so that they are all the same height.

5. Preheat a conventional oven to 180C (365F). When that temperature is reached bake the macarons for 15 minutes.

6. Serve as they are as a biscuit, or you place one on top of another, using a filling such as chocolate ganache, butter cream or jam.