Cooking With the French Chef: Reine de Saba Cake

Welcome back to Cooking With the French Chef, in which I review episodes of Julia Child’s original show, cook out of the new edition of the French Chef Cookbook and share the results with you. Past posts can be found here.

Next to Beouf Borguignon, Julia’s Queen of Sheba cake seems to be one of her most famous recipes as well as her favorite cake. It was featured briefly in Julie and Julia. In the HBO Max series, Julia, our heroine sails into WBGH with a Queen of Sheba cake by way of buttering up the jaded producers. It’s mentioned fondly pretty often on cooking sites, both because of Julia and because Queen of Sheba cake seems to be as ubiquitous to French cuisine as carbonara is to Italian. Lots of variations, methods and opinions.

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/04/the-easy-chocolate-packed-cake-everyone-is-baking-after-watching-hbos-new-julia-child-series/

Yep, the Queen has gotten a lot of love over the years.

Here’s the French Chef episode, which was the third installment in Season Five and originally aired on December 16, 1965:

Seems relatively simple and straightforward, right? Heh. Yeah, not exactly. As we all know, most things are hard the first time they’re tried, and the Queen of Sheba was no different. She turned out to be quite a finicky royal, as everything has to be just so for her to make a proper appearance.

The first step, of course, after greasing the cake pan, was to blanch the almonds so they had time to cool completely and all that, and if anyone hasn’t blanched an almond before (*raises hand*) it’s not as intimidating as it sounds (Find a how-to here). One minute in boiling water, then pull the almonds out and drop them in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process. As long as a close eye is kept on the clock, everything is good.

The real tricky part was peeling the skins off, and everything I read said giving the wide end of a blanched almond a little squeeze will make the meat pop out easily. Well, it was easy. A little too easy, actually. The meat not only popped out of the skins, but shot out. Flew out. Major air. It was the Flight of the Magnificent Almond Brothers, a rather undisciplined lot who engage in impressive feats of physics, landing wherever they so choose.

After about ten or so such demonstrations, I rang the curtain down on the exhibition and restrained the rest of the family by holding both ends of each almond at the same time. After that, we got along famously, although I’m sure they didn’t enjoy being grounded in more ways than one. Some became almond meal in my food processor while others were slated to adorn the Queen in her final form.

Next came melting the chocolate, and I like that Julia enjoyed using chocolate chips in her recipes instead of just baker’s chocolate. Chocolate chips are unpretentious, they’re easily accessible, they can be of good quality, and they melt fast.

After that came the classic step of creaming the butter and egg yolks, which turned out to be the calm before the storm. Kind of.

I know this all sounds kind of rote, but the thing that concerned me the most about this recipe was the egg whites. Beating them too much or too little can spell disaster, and without visual aids I felt as if I were stumbling around in the dark.

Julia’s instructions are pretty straightforward, though: When the egg whites form soft peaks, add salt and a teeny bit of cream of tartar. When the egg whites hold a shape, they’re ready to go.

And no, I didn’t get them right the first time, but we’ll get to that. Here’s how they looked on that first go-round at the soft peak stage:

Following what I hoped was enough beating and then folding everything together, this purty little cake pan went into the oven.

What came out, though, was not what I was expecting.

Ummmm…

Does anyone think this looks like a number 2? It’s as if this cake knows it’s not the Queen.

This was no Queen. This was her lady-in-waiting.

I was disappointed, but who wouldn’t be? However, I had plenty of almond meal left, so after another viewing of Julia’s show as well as Jamie the Anti-Chef’s Queen of Sheba episode, I tried again. Only this time I was so nervous about getting things right that I forgot to take photos of Attempt Number Two. However, I didn’t forget to capture the results.

Yep, this was definitely promising, and once the cake cooled I got right into making the ganache, which is simply chocolate, butter, and strong coffee all melted together. It started out pretty thin, but I helped it cool off pretty quickly by sticking the bowl in another bowl full of ice water. The idea is thin ganache, but not too thin.

Time to crown the Queen! Some of the Almond Brothers returned for an encore, of course. Initially the cake was pretty shiny, but after I stuck it in the fridge to set it turned nicely matte. Chocolate chips tend to set up pretty quickly.

Before setting up…

And after. Behold the Queen!

Isn’t she a looker? The big question is, though, how did she taste?

Decadent. Absolutely decadent. And fudge-y. And dense. And wonderfully chocolate-y.

So yeah, what went wrong before? The obvious thing was that I didn’t beat the egg whites enough. They’re not just supposed to hold a shape but be pretty shiny, too, almost like a meringue. Also, I probably overmixed when I combined the butter-egg yolk-chocolate mixture with the egg whites the first time. Julia says it’s OK to have a few streaks of egg white running through the batter. It’s better than overmixing.

The final difference was that both times I used a nine-inch cake pan instead of an eight-inch one, which meant the cake had more room to spread and baked up thinner, although the texture was just right on the second attempt.

The lady-in-waiting…

And the Queen…

See the difference? I guess I’ll have to buy an eight-inch cake pan and try again, just to see what happens.

It goes without saying that my little family and I made short work of the Queen of Sheba, and as for the lady-in-waiting, she didn’t go to waste. In fact, she made a very lovely snack cake.

Another post is coming up on Tuesday. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope you have a great rest of the weekend…

The French Chef Cookbook, The French Chef, Volume One (DVD) and The French Chef, Volume 2 (DVD) are available to own from Amazon.

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