Buttery and super moist, incredibly quick and easy cake to prepare with seasonal fruits, ideal for kid’s snack, afternoon tea or breakfast.
In this post
What is moelleux in French baking
Moelleux is a super soft and moist cake, with the sensation that it melts in your mouth. Made with very simple ingredients, eggs, flour, sugar, and butter… A generous amount of butter for a decadent cake. Moelleux might seem quite rich but I promise, I’ve reduced the amount of butter compared to many French home-cooking recipes.
How I came up with this recipe
This recipe comes from the combination of my childhood memories as my mum use to bale an upside-down cake with soft apricots neatly arranged once unmold (I definitely have to ask her recipe) and a cake shared in social media by the French gastronomic critic François-Régis Gaudry. He wrote an incredible book (half cookbook half information on French gastronomy, a must-have if you’re a French Foodie) and runs on Sundays on the radio a great program called “On va déguster”.
Be that as it may, this recipe is the proof that French pastry can be super quick, easy. The only “touchy” thing is that you need to have room temperature butter, thus taken out of the fridge an hour before. Apart from that you only need to combine all ingredients. No technique, no equipment needed. Quickly prepared, quickly baked and yet very tasty.
A few information on the recipe
- I suggest equal parts of apricot and peach, but you can vary. Peach or nectarine, white or yellow. Apricot and peach or just one of the two … or even plums or red fruits.
- This is a quick recipe where you pour all the ingredients into a bowl and coarsely combine. It’s okay if the dough isn’t even and smooth. We don’t need to blanch the eggs with sugar as it is often done in cakes, nor to sift the flour, or to get a perfectly smooth dough.
- Sugar: I very often bake using brown sugar now, but you can replace it with white sugar. If your fruits are very ripe and sweet, you can reduce the amount of sugar.
- Butter at room temperature is important because we roughly combine all the ingredients. If you are using cold butter you will need a food processor.
Moelleux Cake with Apricot and Peach
Ingredients
500 gr of of pitted fruits
- 300 gr apricot
- 2 peaches or nectarines
Dough
- 150 gr brown sugar or caster sugar
- 110 gr flour ideally semi whole
- 110 gr butter at room temperature
- 6 gr baking powder
- 2 eggs
- vanilla abstract
For the mold
- butter
- flour
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180 °C / 350 °F
Prepare the cake
- Pit apricots, pit and peel the peaches or nectarines. Cut the apricots in 4 and the peaches of the same size.
- In a large bowl, put all the dough ingredients and roughly ingredients.
- Add the fruit chunks to the dough, combine.
Bake
- Grease and flour a mold. Pour the dough and bake at 180 °C / 350 °F for about 40 minutes.
- The baking time depends on the thickness of the dough and therefore on the size of your mold. Check if the cake is baked with a sharp knife, the blade should come out dry.