They have been on the requested recipe list since we started this classic series. Several times I resolved to pay attention to it, but each time I backed away. Canelés are notoriously difficult to bake. Moreover, you need complicated things, such as copper canelé molds and edible beeswax.
In the meantime, this small, cylindrical French cake has made a huge comeback and has now become an indispensable part of the display case of hip, metropolitan bakers. Whatever you want, with their elegant ribs they look like deep gold gems, and with their crispy caramelized exterior and fluffy, vanilla and rum scented interior they taste just as chic. The pastry originally comes from Bordeaux, where it was perhaps baked as early as the fifteenth, but certainly as early as the eighteenth, century. The name refers to the word canneluremeaning notch, or groove. In France it is sometimes written with a double n: cannelé.
Cookbook writer Rutger van den Broek also does this in his book published this week Pastry Bible. Cannelés de Bordeaux is one of the recipes he has been working on for the longest time, he admits as we stand together in his semi-professional home kitchen brushing copper molds with a mixture of melted butter and beeswax. “The recipe is not complicated at all, but somehow the smallest details can lead to failure. It still happens to me sometimes, when I use different milk or different flour or something, that they just don’t come out of the oven properly.”
Rutger is the reason that I dare to finally serve you canelés today. We’ve known each other since I met him on the first episode of the first season of All of Holland Bakt on X (then still Twitter) as a possible winner, after which he indeed won and we were allowed to talk about it together on the radio. Since then, I have occasionally approached him with a baking question, and in this case with the request to help me get rid of my fear of canelé.
“Even at the most renowned patisseries in Paris you sometimes see pale dots on top of the canelés,” he immediately reassures me. “But actually that is not the case.” For Pastry Bible the author stayed in the French capital for weeks and visited all the famous and less famous cake shops. How does it go then? A high-gloss (due to the beeswax), evenly colored, dark golden brown crust.
To demonstrate how easily things can go wrong, Rutger fills one of the copper molds to the brim instead of 1 centimeter below. In the oven, this specimen rises above the mold like a mushroom. When unloading, the bottom appears to have come loose from the bottom, making it barely colored and certainly not crispy. It is an anemic canelee, which contrasts sadly with its successful oven companions.
Encouraged by Rutgers tips, when I get home I order a bag of food-safe beeswax and a set of copper canelé molds from the Duikelman cooking store. According to Rutger, these are the best. Copper conducts the heat needed for a caramelized crust much better than other metals. The price is high, five bucks for six pieces. But it must be said: they are so cute to fall in love with. While I’m brushing them, I’m already thinking about what else I can do with them, besides baking canelés. Panna cotta mold? Tea light holder? Paper clip collection tray?
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