Never have I ever baked a recipe in another language, and never will I ever again. If I take one thing away from this experience, it is that French 1 was not enough to get me through such an endeavor. Look, baking isn’t that hard, but now try doing it while only knowing five words. It definitely increases the difficulty of something I’ve baked, but never from scratch.
In preparation for this, I furiously typed “french dessert gluten free recipe” into my Safari tab and clicked on the first result that popped up. I then had to add French as a language on my computer just to use the Safari translate feature to translate the page into French. While I could’ve found one originally in the terrible language, I wanted to be able to compare what I thought the instructions were saying versus what they actually said. After printing out my recipe, I gathered my ingredients and began the baking. Then the confusion began.
Since French (understandably) is not a common language, I have provided a few English translations when necessary, translated by yours truly.
Ingrédients // Ingredients
- 3 grosses pommes de dame roses pelées et tranchées finement
- 3 large pink lady apples, peeled and sliced finely
- 1 tasse de mélange de farine sans gluten
- 1 cup flour mix without gluten
- 1 tasse de sucre blanc biologique plus une cuillère à de sucre
- 1 cup plus a tablespoon white organic sugar
- 2 cuillères à café de poudre à pâte sans aluminium
- 2 teaspoons baking powder without aluminum
- ½ cuillères à café de sel
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 9 cuillères à soupe de beurre non salé
- 9 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 3 gros œfs
- 3 large eggs
- ¾ tasse de lait entier ou de lait non laitier
- ¾ cup whole or nondairy milk
- 4 cuillères à soupe de rhum noir ou 1 c. à thé d’extrait de rhum
- 4 tablespoons rum or 1 tablespoon rum extract
- 1 cuillères à café de jus de citron
- 1 teaspoons lemon juice
- 1 cuillères à café d’extrait de vanille pure
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Starting off strong, I assumed “tasse” = cup, “cuillères à café” = teaspoon, and “cuillères à soupe” = tablespoon, simply because it seemed wrong to have 2 tablespoons of baking powder. I also used almond milk as my nondairy milk, and that was definitely a mistake for reasons you’ll see later.
Instructions
1. Préchauffer le four à 350 degrés F. Assurez-vous de placer la grille du four en position centrale dans votre four.
→ This was very simple; preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and put the baking rack in place four (I had no idea where that was, so I counted down 4 from the top and hoped it was correct).
2. Vaporisez soit un moule à gâteau de 9 pouces, soit un moule avec 6 sections de gâteau de trois pouces avec de l’huile de noix de coco. (Cette poêle est souvent vendue sous la sous la sot de moule à muffins Jumbo).
→ I’m not going to lie, I didn’t understand almost any of this. I got coconut oil from “l’huile de noix de coco,” but had no idea what “pouces” meant. I decided to go with a 9 inch silicon baking tin, and lining the bottom with parchment paper (I ended up also needing 6 muffin cups from a muffin tin).
3. Couper le papier sulfurisé pour recoubler le fond de la ou des casseroles et vaporiser le fond avec de la pulvérisation and antiadhésive.
→ Yeah so actually I skipped this step. Hopefully it wasn’t important because… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I’m hoping it was just line your baking tin and nothing else.
4. Dans une petite casserole, faites cuire le beurre à feu doux jusqu’à ce qu’il soit légèrement doré. (Environ 5 minutes). Remuez souvent.
→ This was where I began to regret choosing to do this. Duolingo did NOT prepare me for this (Duo please spare me). Is it saying to melt the butter? Or soften it? Don’t ask me. No like actually don’t ask me, I originally thought it was to soften, but then later in the process I had to melt the butter for it to make sense in the context. I’m still confused why there’s “5 minutes” for supposedly melting butter, but French is an odd language so I won’t ask. (After translating, I have discovered I was supposed to brown the butter, that’s why it says 5 minutes).
5. Retirer du feu et laisser refroidir pendant 10 minutes.
→ Alright, I definitely did this wrong. On my notated recipe, I translated “laisser” as “milk,” when in fact, it is not. Using this assumption, I left my milk out to come to room temperature as I contemplated my life reading the next step. (It means “to leave” if you were wondering)
6. Dans une petite casserole, ajoutez deux pouces d’eau et des tranches de pomme. Cuire les tranches de pomme à feu doux jusqu’à ce qu’elles ramollissent. Gardez un œil sur eux pour qu’ils ne deviennent pas pâteux.
→ I gave up on this step. Here I was seriously thinking about giving up and just making the recipe in English, but after a couple phone-a-friends to my lovely mother and father, I made it through (read: they translated it for me and told me what to do). I boiled the apples for about 5 minutes or however long it took me to try to figure out what the second part of the step was instructing, then drained and saved the water. Then I asked my lovely French father and he said the instructions didn’t want me to save the apple broth so I dumped it.
7. Égoutter l’eau des pommes, mouiller avec 1 cuillère à soupe de rhum foncé et de jus de citron, et laisser refroidir.
→ Confused as ever, I tried to figure out what “l’eau des pommes” was since I already dumped out my apple water??? In the end, I ignored it and just added the tablespoon of rum and lemon juice, then refrigerated. It was then when I realized that “laisser” does not mean “milk,” and I instead changed my translation to “mix” (which is also incorrect).
8/9. Dans un grand bol à mélanger, mélanger la farine sans gluten, la gomme de xanthane, la poudre à pâte et le sucre. Dans un bol moyen, fouetter ensemble les œufs, le lait, le beurre doré, la vanille et les trois cuillères á soupe restantes de rhum noir.
→ For readers’ sake, I combined these two steps as they are just mixing ingredients in separate bowls. However, I do still wonder where the xanthan gum came from, as it wasn’t in the ingredients list? They really just added some extra ingredients and told me to figure it out, which resulted in me—guess what—ignoring it! Can you sense a theme yet?
10/11. Versez les ingrédients humides dans les ingrédients secs et mélangez soigneusement. Pliez doucement less pommes.
→ After here, I began going somewhat autopilot. I added the wet and dry ingredients, along with the slightly cooled apples, and mixed.
12/13. Verser dans la ou les casseroles. Saupoudrer ½ cuillère à café de sucre sur chaque mini gâteau (ou 1 cuillère à soupe de sucre sur un gâteau entier).
→ This is when I realized I was going to need some more cake tins, and ran to get muffin tins. I thought “hey this is probably only enough for one cake” then it almost overflowed… lesson learned.
14/15/16. Cuire au four pendant 30 à 45 minutes, selon la taille de la casserole. Moins de temps est nécessaire si vous faites cuire 6 gâteux de trois pouces. Retirer du four et laisser refroidir les gâteaux sur une grille de refroidissement. Profitez-en au chaud.
→ Finally at the end, I BSed my way through the baking times, making up random numbers as I went. Also, notice anything odd? While I was putting away the ingredients, I realized the recipe never actually adds the teaspoon of salt it calls for, so I guess I was supposed to read the mind of the person creating the recipe and know to add it with the dry ingredients. Once the cakes were done, I let them rest for a few hours on the baking trays/plate.
Final thoughts? This was hard. Like, I was expecting it to be hard, I did not expect it to be THIS hard. The cake was surprisingly good, there was just a very strong almond milk flavor some might not enjoy (looking at you, Emi Gruender, who gagged when she took a bite—I swear it’s not that bad). Now would I do this again? Hell no. Maybe in German where I know more of the language, but I did not learn enough in French 1 to get through this by myself. At least now I have cake to eat as I listen to my ancestors rolling in their graves. “Let them eat cake!” and all, but you might not want to eat the cake from this.