FFwD: Sablé Breton Galette with Berries

Today´s recipe for the French Fridays with Dorie group, is a French specialty from Brittany, namely Sablé Breton Galette with Berries.

This shortbread like butter cookie base has so few ingredients that you cannot get away with cutting corners, good quality butter and flour are essential, and plenty of them. Other than flour and butter, you will need some baking powder, fleur de sel and one large egg.  I made an effort to get farm fresh butter for these and substituted the regular white all purpose flour with artisanal spelt flour and I did add some homemade vanilla sugar to the dough as well.

Do make sure to treat the dough gently, chill it for a good three hours and bake the cookies for a good thirty minutes (since I used mini heart shaped fluted tart pans with removeable bottoms instead one large tart pan – these were done in less time than provided for in the recipe).

While the dough for the cookies is chilling, you can prepare the lovely lemon curd. Again, with plenty of quality ingredients such as farm fresh eggs, sugar, organic lemon juice, a bit of light corn syrup (I used maple syrup – no corn syrup to be found anywhere around here and I much prefer maple syrup anyways) and good fresh butter. You can speed up the chilling time by preparing an ice bath for the curd, that way, the curd will have settled and cooled by the time the cookie hearts bake and have had time to cool completely as well. Of course, you are free to make the lemon curd a day in advance, put it in a jar and place it in the fridge overnight. Spread some curd on the cooled cookie base and top the cookie hearts with seasonal fruits of your choice. Homemade lemon curd is quick and easy and so much more mouthwatering than the store bought variety. In addition to spreading the lemon curd on these delicious and buttery French treats, you will certainly find endless other fabulous uses for the curd, such as serving it with vanilla ice cream.

To keep up the French theme (and colors) of this wonderful recipe, I used blueberries and big fat blackberries – while the blackberry bushes in the garden do not bear ripe fruits yet, I did find some nice ones at the store – the tiny wood (wild) strawberries, however, are from our garden, they must be my favorite berries of all times. Whatever berries you use, try to use a medley of blue and red berries to make these Sablés stand out – blueberries, strawberries and blackberries or raspberries all work well.

This rich home baked treat was a real crowd pleaser and the shortbread like cookie hearts filled the kitchen with a wonderful buttery freshly baked smell. The cookie hearts taste dense and rich since they are made with such a generous amount of butter, that does not really come as a surprise. The butter also gives these cookies their melt-in-the-mouth texture. The cookies are pale golden brown in color and taste a bit nutty from the spelt flour (my latest food obsession) that I used. The lemon curd cuts nicely through the richness of the buttery dough and the fruits are just an utter summery delight as a topping.

If you are interested to take a look at how the other members of the French Fridays with Dorie Group interpreted this recipe, click here.