No. 3317

Marillan Cakes

Gateaux Marillan

Bake a baba in a flat mold having a cover, or else in a tin mold covered with another. Moisten the crust lightly with baba syrup (No. 3227) and cut it two-thirds across without detaching it at the further end; empty the crumbs out partly and fill this double crust with flavored whipped cream or else with smooth cooked Italian cream (No. 140). The top and around the base of the cake should be covered with liquid apricot marmalade (No. 3675) laid on with a brush.

← No. 3316 Madeleines with Rum Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3318 Mars Cakes →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly recipe: Ranhofer assumes you already have baba dough, a soaking syrup, a cooked cream and an apricot glaze in the kitchen. The whole point is the covered mold, which gives you a flat-topped cake with a firm crust on both faces that can be split and filled like a case.

The covered mold is the hingeBaba dough baked uncovered domes and stays open-crumbed; baked between two flat tins it is compressed into a slab with a smooth, sturdy top skin. Any two shallow straight-sided cake pans of the same size will serve, the upper one weighted lightly. Ranhofer gives no guidance on how far to let the dough rise before the lid goes on.
OvenRanhofer gives no heat here. A baba of this size wants a fairly brisk oven, 375-400F, for roughly 25-35 minutes; covered, it will take toward the longer end and will not colour on top, so judge by the sides and by a skewer.
Baba syrupHis No. 3227 is a sugar syrup flavoured with spirit. Note that he says lightly: unlike a rum baba, this cake is not meant to be saturated. Brush the crust rather than soaking the cake.
"Smooth cooked Italian cream"His No. 140 appears to be a cooked cream in the pastry-cream family rather than an Italian meringue. A good pastry cream, flavoured with vanilla or kirsch and beaten smooth, is the closest equivalent; whipped cream is the alternative he offers.
Emptying the crumbCut two-thirds of the way through horizontally, leaving a hinge, then pull out the interior crumb with your fingers or a spoon, leaving a shell perhaps half an inch thick all round. Do not scoop through the base. The removed crumb is worth keeping for a charlotte or for crumbing.
Apricot marmalade glazeHis No. 3675 is a thick apricot preserve. Modern apricot preserve, warmed with a spoonful of water and strained, brushes on the same way. Apply it hot and thin; it sets to a seal that keeps the crust from drying.
Timing and yieldTiming -- fill shortly before serving, or the cream will soften the shell. Ranhofer gives no mold size and no yield.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and this section of small cakes for entremets is essentially a catalogue of the pastry department's standing repertoire, written in the compressed cross-referenced style of a kitchen that already knew how to make baba dough and apricot glaze. The cake is a member of the large nineteenth-century family of gâteaux built on baba or savarin dough rather than on genoise: yeast-raised, lightly steeped, filled with cream and glazed. Names of this kind in French pastry were commonly honorifics or house inventions, often attached to a patron, a proprietor or a place, and no source documents a Marillan; the surrounding entries in Ranhofer's own list, from Madeleines with Rum to Mars Cakes, show the same alphabetical parade of borrowed and coined titles. What the recipe does record precisely is the technique that made the cake possible, the double mold, a device that turns an airy yeast dough into a flat-lidded case suitable for filling.