Yogurt cake upside-down with pear halves

I don't do a lot of baking, but I do like to make simple cakes and breads from time to time. Yesterday, I realized we didn't really have any desserts or other sweets in the house. I was in the kitchen working on other things, it was raining outside, and I had time, so I baked a cake.

The recipe I chose is an old French standby — Gâteau au yaourt. This yogurt cake is something French children have learned to make for generations. Making it is very simple and straightforward, and you don't even need a kitchen scale or measuring cup. Yogurt comes in containers that hold 125 milliliters — that's about half a cup in American terms — and you can use the yogurt container to measure the other ingredients that go into the cake batter.

Here's my translation into English of the recipe I used yesterday. I don't remember where I got it; it's just one of several Gâteau au yaourt recipes in our collection.

Yogurt Cake

1 pot plain yogurt (one-half cup)

2 pots sugar (one cup)

3 eggs

1 pinch salt

3 pots flour (1½ cups)

½ pot vegetable oil (¼ cup)

1 tsp. baking powder

Mix together the yogurt, sugar, and eggs until the sugar is dissolved. Add the flour, oil, and salt and mix to make a smooth batter. Finally, mix in the baking powder just before pouring the batter into a buttered cake pan. Bake at 180ºC (350ºF) for 25 to 30 minutes or until done.

I had made the batter (except for adding the baking powder) and was doing other things when Walt came into the kitchen. "What can I put into this cake batter to make it better?", I asked him. "Raisins? Cranberries? Walnuts?" I didn't feel like cracking and shelling walnuts. Walt said we had a can of pear halves and a can of peaches down in the cellar.

"What about a pear upside-down cake then?" That was my idea — gâteau renversé aux poires caramélisées. I made a caramel syrup on top of the stove in a sauté pan that I could bake the cake in, using maybe half a cup of cassonade (raw unrefined or light-brown sugar, that is), a splash of the syrup the peaches were packed in, and about 2 tablespoons of butter.

When the syrup had thickened slightly, I put the pear halves in it cut side down and let them cook for a couple of minutes. Then I took the pan off the heat and let it cool slightly while I added the baking powder to the cake batter and stirred it one last time. Finally, I poured the batter over the pears and baked the cake as per the recipe above. Yum.

It's important to turn the cake out of the pan while it's still hot. If it cools too much, the caramel will seize up and the cake won't fall out. But one thing you can always do is heat the cake back up over a low fire for a minute or two. When the cake will move in the pan, it's ready to be turned out and served, pears upwards.

Météorologie et géographie

The winds and heavy rains that were predicted for this week haven't yet materialized. We've had some rain but nothing exciting, and the wind has been only slightly gusty for short periods — no real gales.

Early January 2012 sunrise

Let's see if this link works: it takes you to an Accuweather radar screen showing precipitation moving across Brittany, Normandy, Paris, and the Loire Valley, including Tours. If you click on the link and then move the map around a little you can also see the southern part of England, including London. Refresh the page to see the current weather. Below is a still image that I captured just a minute ago.

We're only about 40 miles east of "the capital" of the old French province of Touraine, 25 miles south of the old royal town of Blois, and about 65 miles south and west of Orléans. Paris is 140 miles north of Saint-Aignan.

There's some geography and weather for your Monday. The temperature this morning is about 7ºC (45ºF) with light rain right now. We cooked something good yesterday — Thai chicken with basil and garlic — but I forgot to take any photos. I had to debone a chicken because we can't buy ground chicken meat here.

Rainy weather, and Poulet à la Kiev

The long, tall, wide laurel hedge around our yard has been trimmed one more time, so it looks today just like what you see in the five-year-old photo below. We hire the job done these days instead of doing it ourselves. The best part is that the gardening crew rakes up and disposes of all the clippings.

Early January 2011 — looks like the weather then was about like the weather now: rainy.
It's hard to believe that 2011 was already five years ago...

A day or two ago, Walt mentioned on his blog that we made chicken Kiev the other day. For me, that was one of those things like veal cordon bleu, veal piccata, or steak Diane, that we thought of as exotic and fancy cooking back in the 1970s.

We happened to see Jamie Oliver prepare chicken Kiev on a show on French television a few days ago, and that inspired us. Our version worked pretty well, though most of the butter ran out of the chicken breast before it finished cooking. Still, the garlic and herbs of the compound butter gave the chicken good flavor. I thought the peas with carrots and mushrooms were good with it.

We used panko for the crust on the chicken, and we decided to bake the breaded chicken breasts in the oven rather than frying them.

It seems that chicken Kiev is still a commonly featured dish in the U.K. and Australia, but I don't think that's true in the U.S. Am I wrong?

By the way, I can't recall ever seeing poulet à la Kiev on menus in France, but Ricardo, the Quebec cook and TV personality, has a recipe for it on his web site.

What we didn't have for lunch...

...and what we did have. It was Thursday, and we were still eating holiday leftovers. We had a couple of pieces of roasted Christmas turkey from the freezer, and we had some white beans left from the January 1 cassoulet.

We also had a green salad. After I'd washed the lettuce, Walt noticed the little gastropod pictured above crawling around in the kitchen sink. I'm glad we didn't eat him by accident. We both like to eat escargots but this one was just too little.

With the leftover beans and turkey, we made a version of Boston baked beans. Or Québec baked beans, because I saw the recipe on the web (www.ricardocuisine.com) and it called for maple syrup, among other ingredients (ketchup, tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, cloves, cinnamon, paprika, and cayenne pepper). Delicious with chunks of turkey meat in it and bacon on top.