Travel cakes

Where does the name come from?

Historically, these cakes were made to accompany long journeys, often by boat, train or stagecoach. The aim was to create a cake that was not fragile, that could withstand a little shaking, and that kept well, at least for several days, and didn't need to be put in the fridge.

Madame de Sévigné

A pretty legend attributes the invention of the term "travel cake" to Mme De Sévigné in the ^17th century in a letter to her daughter, but it's more a modern invention, stemming from contemporary patisserie, popularized notably by chefs like Pierre Hermé and Christophe Michalak.

Characteristics of a travel cake :

To meet all these requirements, travel cakes have certain compositional imperatives:

They contain no cream (in the sense of crème pâtissière or chantilly, for example), nor fresh fruit, which would not last the desired several days.
They often have a dense or fluffy texture that enables them to remain pleasant without drying out quickly.
They generally contain a low water content to limit the risk of mold and extend their shelf life.
They are often simple in shape, typically cake-shaped, rectangular and elongated.

Classic ingredients:

Travel cake recipes are generally quite simple, using classic ingredients:

butter, sugar, eggs, flour
Sometimes enriched with dried fruit (almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios), candied fruit or spices.
Some recipes include alcohol, such as rum or Grand Marnier, for added flavor and preservation.

Some examples of travel cakes:

All cakes: chestnut, clementine, chocolate, hazelnut and orange, ...
Roasted almond cake
Oatmeal walnut cake
Leopard cake
Gingerbread
And many more...

In a nutshell: "Gâteau de voyage" is a lovely French gastronomic term, referring to long-lasting, easy-to-carry cakes that you can take with you on a trip.

Lasts posts

A tablet holder

Perhaps you too cook by consulting your recipe on a tablet or phone, and putting it down on your worktop? It's practical, but not the best solution. Here's a look at how you can make an inexpensive, almost universal stand.
March 14^th 20261,0985

Pre-calibrated pastry dough

When making pie dough (shortbread, shortcrust, sweet...), it's always a good idea to make a lot at once, and then divide it into pieces, which you can freeze. I've already pointed out the mistake not to make, which is to form a ball before freezing. It's difficult to roll out afterwards because...
March 9^th 20261,0975

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20253,1595

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20252,0825

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,906

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very...
October 10^th 201821 K5

Coarsely chopped herbs

Although we are in the middle of winter as I write these lines, you should not hesitate to make salads at this time, it is actually quite simple, rather fast, and so pleasant. A while ago, I already told you that a salad is a salad, but a salad with herbs is immediately something much better:...
January 9^th 202116 K4.9

85 grams of eggs?

Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...
November 26^th 201858 K4.6

The proper use of a dusting machine

Let's take a look at a simple gesture, the sprinkling, that is to say to distribute a fine powder (icing sugar, sugar, flour,...) on a surface. If you have to sprinkle something, you may use a sprinkler or "poudrette" (in french) it is a very simple utensil, a box, with a lid pierced with holes...
July 31^th 201912 K4.6

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202314 K5