Gâteau Basque au Chocolat is a classic Basque recipe with a thick sandy pastry shell filled with vanilla pastry cream and cherry jam. The chocolate pastry cream version is lesser-known but we found Mercotte, a well-known French pastry blogger, who offered this iteration online. (There are other versions with a chocolate pastry crust or with pistachios.) What we love about this recipe is that the pastry dough surrounds the filling, from bottom to sides to top. Plus, the pastry itself is unique—neither flaky nor cakey—it has a sandy, rich texture which one does not find in American desserts.

Starting with the crust, the first issue is whether to cream the butter and sugar or cut the butter into the flour. Most recipes we found used the creaming method but we found that the latter was better—it had a less cakey texture. Almond flour is a common ingredient but our guess is that it works better with a different type of filling—cherries and vanilla pastry cream—so we stuck with flour. The dough calls for baking powder and when it came to butter, we went with a full two sticks since that is the hallmark of this dough. As for eggs, one whole egg was better than just using yolks which turn out a crumbly dough. The dough is refrigerated in two pieces; one twice as big as the other.

For the pastry cream, most French recipes call for milk but we found half-and-half was necessary to provide the richness the filling deserves. Chocolate helps set the pastry cream so we needed only two tablespoons of cornstarch and three yolks. We kept the sugar level low to let the sweetness of the crust shine. A bit of espresso powder and rum makes a more interesting filling.

The cake is baked in a 9-inch springform pan whereas the French would use a pastry ring. (A lot of French and English pastry chefs use bottomless rings for baking.) The recipe calls for rolling out the dough between sheets of plastic wrap since this is a rich, slightly sticky dough. Personally, I prefer to just roll out the dough using just enough flour to prevent sticking but this is up to you. (For easy rolling, the dough needs to warm up a bit—10 minutes or so—after being taken from the refrigerator.) The large round of dough is rolled out first and placed in the pan so that the perimeter of the dough extends at least one inch up the sides of the pan. The filling is added and the second round of dough is placed on top, the edges of the first round of dough pressed down on top of the second round. A fork is used to make a decorative edge and then a cross-hatch pattern is made over the center of the dough. The dough is brushed with whisked egg white before baking. The gateau is baked in a 375°F oven for about an hour.

Now you have a Basque classic, the sort of recipe you can bring out for a holiday dinner and be confident that it will offer a pleasant surprise, especially with its hidden chocolate filling.

Chris Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."