Nos deux galettes des rois en 2019

Yesterday I went down to the village bakery to get some pastries we could have as desserts this week. I picked out two éclairs, one iced with chocolate cream and one with coffee cream. I'll have to take photos of them. I also picked out two parts de flan — wedges of custard pie. Then I noticed that there were several different galettes des rois on display at the other end of the bakery counter. The least expensive was a galette à la frangipane (to serve four people) and cost nine euros. What the heck, I thought, I'll spend the money and we'll see how good it is.

It's been years since we've bought a galette des rois, the traditional "kings' cake" that people in France eat on January 6, which is the Catholic holiday called the Epiphany. According to legend, that's the day the three kings or "wise men" arrived in Bethelehem from the East bearing gifts for the newborn Christ child. Along the North Carolina coast, people used to celebrate Christmas on January 6, I've been told — they called it "old Christmas." Anyway, we haven't bought a galette in years because Walt makes them. From scratch, including the puff pastry and the almond cream called frangipane that he fills them with. Here's the one he made this year.

The cake Walt made was obviously much fresher than the baker's galette des rois when we ate it. It had a "cleaner" taste, I thought. Maybe the baker's cake had been refrigerated since January 6. It wasn't bad though, once I heated it up on the low setting in the microwave oven for a minute or two to soften the butter in the pastry and the frangipane a little bit. It obviously cost three or four times as much as the cost of the ingredients used to make the home-made galette.