French Grandma Baking

French Grandma Baking ~ Also known as cuisine grand-mère or grandma baking or cooking.  Back in the pre-blogging days, or at least before I was aware of blogging, I was reading a magazine about a style of cooking called grand-mère baking or cooking.  This intrigued me because my grandmothers were French. I spoke to my sister to clarify my memories of our grandmother’s cake.  She said I had it wrong; it was not my great-grandmother, but rather my great-great-grandmother that immigrated to America from France.  From that point this cake conversation sparked a whole investigative matter.

So I started researching ancestry.  Turns out that we found where she and her husband boarded a ship, The Swanton, from Le Havre, France along with their six children, the oldest was my ggrandmother, who was eight, and the youngest were one year old twin girls. They arrived in New Orleans, and then took a steamboat up the Mississippi to St. Louis.  That eight year grew up and married someone that also came from France, keeping the French influence going. I don’t know all that happened after that; we are still researching, but I know she passed down the cake recipes; lovely chocolate génoise filled with strawberry jam, and yogurt cakes.  Somewhere along the way with busy lives and Betty Crocker this all got lost, but when I read the article it all started me thinking about things we just took for granted from grandma’s house.

Per that magazine article the yogurt cake is one of the first cakes grandmothers teach their grandchildren to make.  It is easy and it is all based on the half-cup yogurt container. One container of yogurt, one of oil, two containers of sugar, and three containers of flour, along with eggs, a pinch salt, baking powder, and vanilla, and/or other flavorings.  See  how easy; a child could do it.

Then recently while looking through Bon Appétit magazine there was a French yogurt cake much like what I had read about years before. I was so intrigued by the ease of this cake I just had to try it.

Bon Appétit has made a few changes like using a little more yogurt, but it is pretty much how I remembered.  The recipe called for vegetable oil, but vegetable oil has soy so I used canola oil.  It was disappointing.  It tasted oily to me.  Then I tried butter, and this was pretty good, but required creaming so I continued to search.  Then one day I was in the baking section at Trader Joe’s. I spied grape seed oil.  Grape seed oil is very light, it happened to be reasonably priced so I had to try it.  I am happy to report I am so happy with the results.  Grape seed is light in tastes and the texture is just as it should be, and I will be putting this on my keeper list.  In fact I think one of these should be in the freezer at all times for those unexpected visitors.

Thank you to all those French Grand- mères for helping this child.  Thanks to Trader Joe’s for the grape-see oil.  Thanks grandma for all those cakes that we took for granted.