Epiphany

Today, the sixth of January, is Epiphany. When we were in France last year, my wife and I were introduced to their traditions for the day and we decided to bring those to our friends back here in England today. It also provided a good excuse to catch up with the girls from work before we start back tomorrow.

The traditions we followed were thus:

- send the youngest member of the party under the table

- ask them to allocate each slice to each person

- see who finds the fèvre (or baking bean in our case) in the galette des rois (Epiphany cake)

- the one who finds the fèvre is king or queen for the day (or rest of the evening)

It was a lot of fun this evening, and it was fun to introduce some differing culture to our friends. 

The galette we served up was mostly homemade (other than the ready-roll puff pastry), and our recipe was based on a Raymond Blanc one that I found on BBC food, but was unfortunately taken down before yesterday when I went to find it again. Therefore, I did my best to remember the ingredients and process followed.

Ingredients:

75g soft butter

75g icing sugar

100g ground almonds

1 tbsp amaretto

1 egg

2 egg yolks

500g puff pastry

1. roll out the puff pastry and cut out two circles; one 20cm and one 22cm in diameter

2. chill the pastry in the fridge for half an hour or so

3. mix the butter, icing sugar, ground almonds, amaretto, egg and 1 egg yolk to make the frangipane

4. spoon the frangipane onto the smaller circle of pastry, add the fèvre and put the other  pastry circle on top. Press down around the edge to seal.

5. chill in the fridge for at least an hour

6. glaze the galette with the other egg yolk and score a spiral in the top

7. bake in the oven at 180˚C until golden and risen

The main detail that I completely failed to remember was how long to cook the galette for, so we kept a pretty close eye on it. In the end it took about 40 minutes to be ready.

And here's the finished result:

Happy Epiphany everyone!