This petite, temperamental pastry is one of the South Sound’s best desserts

You’ll remember your first canelé.

Its iconic shape resembling a miniature bundt cake, sized somewhere between a standard square chocolate and an egg. Its deep brown exterior, whose sturdiness gives way as you bite, like an apple, into a dreamy, porous cake that bounces like the belly of a freshly cracked crème brûlée.

Like so many classic French desserts, the unusual textural medley is the result of just a handful of pantry ingredients: milk, eggs, butter, sugar, flour, vanilla bean and rum. Simple as cake, it seems, but even experienced pastry chefs have been foiled by this temperamental treat.

That which we call a cake by any other name would smell as — “a finicky little morsel,” said Erin Powell, who began selling canelé this year through her pop-up and order-only bakery, Girl Loves Cake Desserts. She launched her own business in 2019 after more than a decade at kitchens including Pacific Grill, Dirty Oscar’s Annex and en Rama.

She is known for her picturesque macarons in distinct flavors and seasonal peculiarities: pistachio, lemon, sugar cookie, Sweet Tarts, peanut butter cup and The Coug with apple, caramel and Cougar Gold white cheddar cheese. When I saw she had added canelé to her repertoire, I hightailed it to one of the downtown Wednesday summer markets, where I knew I could sink my teeth into one of these rare pastries right then and there. It’s best enjoyed the day it’s baked.

Similar to the kouign-amann, a croissant on a sun-soaked sugar-high, this French delicacy — from Bordeaux, not Bretagne — has been slow to secure a permanent foothold in American bakeries precisely because it is surprisingly difficult to do well.

A sad canelé can suffer from myriad ailments: shrunken cheeks or an otherwise misshapen existence; a “cul blanc” or white bottom, where the pastry rises from its mold in the oven but doesn’t fall, leaving the top blonder than the brown sides; an undercooked, overly dense interior; an under-caramelized or straight-up burnt exterior.

In other words, everything has to go right.

“Their texture to me is what is most intriguing,” said Powell. “You’ve got just this crunchy, crunchy exterior and this custard-like middle when you bite in, and it’s like: How did this happen? How did we get this little morsel tucked into this small, small shape?”

Purists insist the perfect canelé also requires expensive copper molds, which cost $30 or so a pop. Silicone molds exist, but most pros and amateurs alike agree they never work. Powell uses a stainless steel alternative that succeeds, abetted by her patience and skill for perfecting the most persnickety of pastries.

Unlike madeleines or financiers, a tray just isn’t an option thanks to another necessity of this baking process: coating the fluted mold before pouring the batter so that finicky morsel slides right out, one by one.

Traditionally, bakers call for a mixture of melted beeswax and butter. After testing various approaches, Powell, too, decided this 50:50 ratio was the best option.

“You don’t want too much because it will affect the consistency of the batter,” she said, “but not too little or they won’t come out.”

Despite their small stature, they take a full hour to bake and, for idyllic conditions, the vanilla bean must rest with the butter, milk, sugar and flour for 48 hours, stirred every few. Then Powell tempers in the yolks — saved from her white-heavy macaron-making — and adds more milk and a slurp of rum.

She rolls with an attentive approach to time and temperature, starting her Moffat TurboChef convection oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for the first 15 minutes to achieve that chocolaty-brown crust, then dropping to 355 degrees.

This kind of temperature fussing is unusual, but Powell said the convection can handle it, and the canelé benefits from it.

“Knowing your oven is key when you’re baking,” she said.

Some posit the pastry dates to the 17th or 18th century, created by nuns at the Annonciades convent with just flour and yolks. Isabelle Bunisset, author of “Le cannelé, ce mystère nommé désir,” a treatise dedicated to this very nugget, dismisses that notion as but legend. The fluted mold, and the pastry’s namesake, was perhaps first mentioned in a 1937 book; in 1985, a group of Bordeaux chefs banded together to create, as the French are wont to do, a coalition to protect its origins.

After one bite of Powell’s pristine canelé — hers is one of the only offerings in the area — may you understand that the story doesn’t much matter when the result is so plainly divine.

GIRL LOVES CAKE DESSERTS

▪ Locations and hours vary, girllovescakedesserts.com

▪ Details: Lakewood-based pop-up bakery with gluten-free French macarons, canelés and granola

▪ How to order: pre-order online for select Saturday pickups in Lakewood, Enumclaw and Tacoma — follow instagram.com/girllovescakedesserts for updates

▪ Upcoming events: first come, first served at Tacoma Night Market, Nov. 6 at Foss Waterway Seaport and Nov. 13 at Alma Mater, tacomanightmarket.com

This story was originally published October 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM.