Cooking With the French Chef: Genoise 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.

Genoise Cake. It sounds like a song. It’s also rather intimidating, because it’s another case of everything having to be just so for the product to come out correct.

In other words, it’s not so much cooking as a trigonometry problem.

I have to be honest, I went into this cake thinking I could handle it. I figured I had learned something since the Queen of Sheba cake and this recipe wouldn’t faze me. This naïvete is my tragic flaw when it comes to Julia Child recipes. They seem simple on the surface, but in practical application they’re usually a lot more complicated.

We’ll get to that, of course.

Genoise cake made a couple of appearances on The French Chef, starting with this episode, which originally aired on March 31, 1966 as the thirty-first installment in the fourth season:

Roughly five years later, Genoise cake was back in this episode from the seventh season, originally broadcast on December 15, 1971, and, thankfully, in color:

Julia also made Genoise as part of her The Way To Cook video series from 1985 (the relevant part starts at 30:37):

OK. We have now confirmed that Genoise cake is a precise business, and it looks like the Queen of Sheba may have some competition. I had been feeling optimistic up until watching the episodes, but then I felt nervous. I felt like retreating back into Julia’s relatively straightforward chocolate mousse.

Sigh. Chocolate mousse…

Anyway, onward. Right up front, I had two obvious problems: One, I don’t have a deep cake pan, just two regular ones, and every Genoise cake I’ve seen shows the cake being baked in one pan and cut into layers.

Two, I don’t have cake flour. However, there are ways around that, or so I thought. The 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook has gives alternate measurements for cake flour and all-purpose, and since the all-purpose measurements were always a quarter-cup less, I figured I could adjust the Genoise cake and be all right.

Can a Genoise be made with all-purpose flour? I was about to find out.

First, of course, are our cake ingredients, and they seem rather spare.

So yeah, eggs and butter are a thing. The first task was to melt the butter because that had to be tepid when it was time to add it to the mixture.

Next was buttering the cake pans, which we’ve all seen before.

So far, obviously, very normal cake baking, but I was just getting started. The next thing was to get cracking on the eggs, lemon zest, sugar, and vanilla, and heat the whole thing over a a pot of what Julia called “barely simmering water.”

The idea was to beat this mixture until it was foamy and doubled in size, which it did in short order.

I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again if I have: Beating various foods for extended periods is one of the reasons my grandmas had such solid forearms. Well, that and the daily farm chores.

So far, so good. The next thing was to cream in the now-tepid butter and the flour, and here’s were things started getting really weird. The batter got thick. Very, very thick. It was almost like putty.

I didn’t take time to take pictures of the mass, but suffice it to say I was hoping for a miracle. Maybe the cake would rise? Maybe it wouldn’t be a total failure.

Yeahhhh, this was not that day. Has anyone ever seen a cake do this? It almost looked as if it was trying to climb out of the pan.

The underside was no better It was like a cracker. A giant lemon-flavored cracker. I knew this thing was going to be dense, but yeesh.

I tried sampling it. It felt like eating a brick. Or lemon-flavored lembas bread. My son and I could only manage a bite or two, while my husband wouldn’t even touch it, which was probably a wise decision on his part.

Honestly, I haven’t had a cake turn out this badly since that first attempt at making Queen of Sheba cake, but at least that mistake was edible. I kept this thing long enough to show my husband before yeeting it into the trash, where it landed with a forceful, undignified thunk.

What went wrong? I had to do some research, and it turns out that Julia, bless her, left out a few things. Genoise cake is one of the trickiest cakes out there because air is its only leavening agent. Not only that, but the bubbles in the mixture have to be of uniform size or the cake won’t bake evenly, hence the creepy thing I got. Some bakers just fold for a minute or two more, while others give the pan a stomp, and still others run a toothpick through the batter. All of them, like Julia, encourage any would-be Genoise bakers to keep practicing.

Oh, and the flour situation is a bit more nuanced than I thought. Some people use plain flour mixed with cornstarch, while others use cake flour. The latter is recommended most often, though, because cake flour is lighter and therefore produces a lighter product.

So, I got cake flour. And fished my springform pan out of the cupboard. Some of the bakers I saw used them, and it was worth a shot, right?

And while I stuck to Julia’s recipe mostly, I did change a couple of things about the process. Instead of using the electric mixer for the butter and flour, I used it on the stove and then on the counter to whip up the egg mixture.

Unfortunately, though, I overmixed the flour and butter, so the batter went from filling three-quarters of the bowl to about half of it.

At least the resulting cake was edible. My husband had two slices.

I had one lemon left, so I decided to try again, and by this time I had Julia’s recipe almost memorized. Just like before, butter melted and patiently grew tepid on the back of the stove, and for my third go-round the batter was light as a feather.

This time I tried Hanbit Cho’s cushioning method for adding the butter, which meant putting some batter in with the tepid butter and incorporating that before adding it all the the mixture. Gee, that’s not a tongue twister. The batter, miraculously, didn’t deflate all that much, and I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to tempt fate.

Into the oven it all went, and while the cake baked, the big question once again hung in the air: Will it Genoise?

The short answer is no.

On the bright side, the cake was lighter, but it still didn’t rise all that much. I wonder if my springform pan is too big.

I hesitated to frost this thing, because Julia’s frosting is almost as labor-intensive as her cake, not to mention I didn’t think this cake deserved it, but my guys both asked me to. I just didn’t have it in me, and resolved to buy some canned frosting at the store the next day. Don’t haunt me, Julia. Unless you plan on giving me tips about mastering Genoise cake, in which case, yeah, haunt away.

Would I make this cake again? I don’t know. It’s a lot of trouble with an always-uncertain outcome, which makes it too high-maintenance for an everyday-type cake. It’s kind of a pain in the neck, to be honest. And Julia preferred this cake for petits fours. And wedding cake. And pretty much any fancy occasion.

Sorry, Julia, but no thanks. Genoise is too fussy for my liking, even if it tastes good, and anyway, it’s too easy to whip up a conventional yellow cake or sponge cake.

So yeah, we’re calling this one a wash, which means there’s no glamor shot this month. Oh well.

A new Club 15 post is coming out tomorrow, and it also features cake. Well, sort of. Anyway, thanks for reading all, and I hope to see you then…

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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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