4 Quarters make a whole
The name of this cake is un Quatre Quart, literally translated into 4 Quarters. It is a recipe that my grandmother always made to eat with coffee after a 7 or 8 course family meal. I reckon you cannot get a higher recommendation for a cake, than one that still gets finished off to the last crumb by an audience that has been eating solidly for about 4 hours!
I recently found this recipe in one of her old recipe books and I love it; it is so simple. You weigh your eggs and add to them the same weight in sugar, flour and butter. For example: you have 3 eggs and their total weight is 200g, so you add 200 grams of sugar, 200 grams of flour and 200 grams of butter. It could not be simpler.
And here is the way to put it all together:
Un Quatre Quart cake:
-3 eggs
-sugar
-flour
-butter
Separate egg whites from the egg yolks. Mix the egg yolks together with the sugar until you obtain a light cream, slowly add the flour and the soft butter. Whip up the egg whites and fold them into the dough. Pour into a cake loaf tin and bake at a medium temperature for about 30 min until golden.
Voila! I love a thin slice with a strong cup of short black coffee, but it works equally well with a nice cup of tea, English style!
You can download the recipe here.
– Emilie
5 COMMENTS - Add your own
It looks tasty!! I’m going to make it soon.
Now, if only I can figure out how to convert grams to cups…
It is an old classic indeed ; I ate so much of it when I was a child and for whatever reason, my brother kept calling it a Trois Quart (Three Quarter).
See, I thought I had found the one recipe that would circumvent that conversion problem. But you guys don’t even use pounds or ounces, right? Do Americans use weighting scales at all or is everything done by cups?
it’s usually all in cups!
yummy!!!
i’m baking it for french class cause a wanted something easy and tasty!!!!!!