Gateau Basque

The Eguzkia pâtissiers’ selected gâteau basque encloses a rum-flavoured pastry cream in its own butter-and-egg dough. Their official festival recipe presents this cream-filled version with an egg-glazed, fork-marked top.

Softened butter and crystalline sugar are mixed with flour, baking powder, eggs, salt and the selected rum. The dough forms a ball and firms in the refrigerator while the cream is prepared.

For the filling, eggs and fine sugar are whisked with flour. Boiling whole milk is added in two stages, and the cream cooks with continuous stirring until it sets; rum is added at the end before the cream cools.

A buttered, floured mould takes slightly more than half the rolled dough as its base and sides. The cooled cream fills it, and the remaining dough forms a lid, brushed with egg and marked with a fork.

The enclosed cake bakes, then is allowed to cool well before eating. This selected version chooses rum for both dough and cream from the recipe’s rum-or-liquid-vanilla options.