All through Europe traditions of a time of cheerful mischief and "misrule" after Christmas abound -- memories of the role reversals that were part of the ancient Roman solstice feast of Saturnalia. Right down to our modern day, memories of this annual crazy time are preserved...sometimes in the food.

Each year for ten days the social tables would be turned: slaves dressed up in their masters' fine clothes, ordering them around and assuming the trappings of wealth and power while the festival lasted. With the coming of Christianity, some of these upset-the-status-quo traditions attached themselves to the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th, the commemoration of the arrival of the Three Wise Men with their gifts at the birthplace of the Christ Child. And one of these is the making and eating of the Galette des Rois.

The kings referred to in the name Galette de rois are naturally the Three Kings of the Epiphany feast. But there's nothing particularly religious about the cake itself. Its connection with the old Misrule celebrations becomes obvious when you discover that it's baked with a small favor hidden inside it: the person who gets the favor in their slice of the galette is proclaimed King or Queen of the party where the galette is eaten, and gets to wear the gold paper crown that comes with the cake when you buy it.

Originally the prize baked into the galette was a fève or bean, again recalling the black and white beans that the Romans used to choose the King of the Saturnalia celebrations. But these days the favors are usually a lot  fancier, and wildly varied --

-- ranging from Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Asterix, Babar and Lord of the Rings to cats, dogs, old cars, Kings and Queens, writers, philosophers, flowers and plants, household utensils, articles of clothing, Nativity figures, saints, Popes, nautical instruments, positions from the Kama Sutra, musical instruments and shoes.

Some bakers do a different collectible fève each year, and they vie with other local bakers to do the coolest or most expensive favors -- for example, one Parisian patissier has been doing favors made of Swarovski crystal. Other galette makers have taken to inserting one very high-value fève into a large run of galettes, so that if you get lucky you might come across a golden one, or a fève with a diamond in it. But whether they're made of valuable materials or not, fèves are very collectible; online you can find sales sites,  professional suppliers, fève-fan associations, and even the annual fève collectors' convention. 

The Galette itself is extremely seasonal. It's meant to be eaten first on January 6th, but it starts appearing in French patisseries right after New Year's, and remains available until February 2nd, the Feast of Candlemas. In every big French town there's fierce competition to be known as the baker or patissier who makes the best galette des rois, and while the Christmas season is still in full swing, the newspapers are already investigating who'll have the best galette in town this year.

There are regional variations: the southern galettes tend to be more cakelike. The most famous one, the galette des rois that's popular in the Paris region, is fairly simple from the baker's point of view: it's frangipane (a mixture of almond cream and creme patissiere) enclosed in an outer casing of puff pastry, then baked. Our recipe is an adaptation of one from Parisian patissier Stéphane Vandermeersch, who routinely comes up on the "top ten" lists as the maker of some of the best galettes des rois in the City of Lights.

The recipe may look long and complicated, but don't let its length put you off: it's simpler than it seems. You start out by making the creme patissiere and the almond cream. Then you roll out the puff pastry and refrigerate it to make it easier to handle. Finally you assemble the cake, refrigerate it for a little while more, and bake it.

For the outside of the galette you'll need:

• 14 ounces all-butter puff pastry, homemade or store bought, chilled and ready to roll

For the frangipane filling:

• 3/4 cup almond cream and
• 1/4 cup pastry cream (the recipes for both of these follow.)

To flavor the filling:

• 1 tablespoon dark rum

To glaze the puff pastry and glue together the pastry layers:

• 1 large egg 

And to hide in the galette:

• 1 oven-safe trinket about an inch long (French regulations specify that no feve can be more than 1.04 inches in length).

First, make the creme patissiere. The ingredients are:

• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
• 6 large egg yolks
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup cornstarch, sifted
• 3 1/2 tablespoons (1 3/4 ounces) unsalted butter, softened, separated into five or six small pieces

One warning about this before you begin: this recipe will make about four times as much creme patissiere as you need. Unfortunately it is very difficult to make small amounts of creme patissiere, so you're kind of stuck with this situation.  The creme will keep tightly covered with plastic wrap for a couple of days, during which you can stuff a Boston cream pie with it, or use it to fill eclairs.)

Anyway, put the milk and the vanilla bean and its scrapings into a small saucepan, and bring gently to a boil. As soon as the milk boils, get the pan off the heat, cover it, and let the vanilla infuse the milk for at least ten minutes, but preferably an hour or so. (If you let it go this long, you'll need to heat it gently again at the hour's end. This is in fact a good time to put the creme patissiere aside and make the almond cream.)

In a larger, heavy-bottomed saucepan, whisk together very well the egg yolks, cornstarch, and sugar. Very slowly trickle in some of the hot milk (reheated if you took a break to deal with the almond cream) and keep whisking like crazy: this is to temper the eggs so that they won't seize up or scramble on you. When this initial dose of milk is well mixed with the eggs and dry ingredients, add the rest of the hot milk and keep whisking hard.

Turn on the heat under the saucepan and keep on whisking while the creamy mixture comes to a boil. At the boiling point, the mixture will become very thick, very rapidly. Keep whisking hard and lower the heat immediately, keeping an eye on the bottom of the pan to make sure nothing is scorching. If it looks like this is starting to happen as you continue to whisk, take the pan off the heat and just keep whisking. You may not be able to keep actively boiling the mixture, but whether the pan is on the heat or off it, keep whisking for at least two minutes. Then add the butter piece by piece and keep whisking until it's all vanished into the creme patissiere. Locate and discard the remains of the vanilla pod.

(A note here: some recipes for creme patissiere insist that you should push the finished creme patissiere through a sieve. EuroCuisineLady personally feels that you don't really need to do this unless your creme is lumpy. If you whisked it hard enough, it shoudln't be. If you're a perfectionist and want to put it through the sieve anyway, don't let us stop you.)

Have ready a small heat- and cold-proof bowl and pour (or more likely scrape) the creme patissiere into it. Smooth some plastic wrap onto the surface of the creme (to keep a skin from forming) and put the bowl in the refrigerator to cool. (You can hasten the process by putting this bowl in a bigger one half full of cold water or ice cubes.)

To make the almond cream, you need:

• 6 tablespoons (3 ounces) unsalted butter at room temperature
• 3/4 cup confectioners’ / icing sugar
• 3/4 cup ground blanched almonds
• 2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch / cornflour
• 1 large egg, at room temperature

Use the small bowl of a food processor to combine the confectioners' sugar and softened butter until the two ingredients gather together into a smooth ball. Add the almonds and process them with the sugar and butter until very completely incorporated. Then add the flour and cornstarch and process together again. Finally add the egg and continue  processing until the mixture has resolved itself into a smooth cream. Refrigerate this until you're ready for it. (A side note: any leftover almond cream can be frozen and will keep there for a month or so, . Pack it into a little pot or a Zip-Loc bag, freeze it, and then when you want it defrost it in the fridge overnight; beat it when defrosted to make it creamy again.

Now it's time to deal with the puff pastry.

You're going to need two circles of puff pastry: one about nine inches in diameter (this will be the bottom of the galette) and one about nine and a half inches wide (this will be the top). Roll out the pastry about 1/8 inch thick (or spread out your sheets of ready-rolled puff pastry) on a lightly floured surface and use a very sharp knife to cut out the circles by tracing around an upturned bowl or cake pan of the right size for each one. Set each circle on a piece of baking parchment and put each of these on a baking sheet or other flat surface: refrigerate them for 15-20 minutes.

When the circles are ready to come out of the fridge, combine the creme patissiere and the almond cream together to make the frangipane. Use:

• 3/4 cup almond cream
• 1/4 cup creme patissiere

Mix them together gently with a fork until completely combined. (Try not to beat any air in.) Stir in the rum until it too is completely combined with the frangipane.

Get the pastry circles out of the fridge. Crack the remaining egg into a small bowl and beat it gently. With a pastry brush, paint the outermost inch of the smaller / bottom circle with beaten egg. Carefully spoon and spread the frangipane into the center of the circle, spreading it evenly out toward the egg-painted circumference. Gently press the ovenproof token down into the frangipane, somewhere between the middle and the rim, and spread some frangipane over it, covering the token up.

Once this is done, immediately take the larger / top circle of pastry and place it on top of the frangipane and bottom puff pastry layer. With a fork, crimp the edges of the top layer firmly down onto the egg-painted lower layer. Be thorough about this, as you do not want to allow the frangipane a chance to leak out the sides (and indeed the stuff is probably already oozing toward the edges).

Once the edges are sealed, brush the whole top circle and the new upper edges very well with the beaten egg. Then, with a very sharp-pointed knife or even a razor blade, lightly score the top of the galette with a decorative pattern (being very very careful not to cut all the way through). This pattern can be straight lines, or curved ones radiating out from the center toward the sealed edge -- whatever you like. Cut a small slit in the very middle to let out the steam that will build up during baking.

When finished with the scoring, place the galette on a baking sheet and shove it in the refrigerator again for about half an hour. Position a rack in the center of your oven, and preheat the oven to 230C / 475F. When it's ready, put in the galette and immediately reduce the heat to 400F / 200C. Bake for forty minutes total. Check the galette around the twenty-minute mark to make sure it's not browning too fast: if it is, place a tent of foil over the galette to protect it.

When the time is up and the galette is nicely puffed up and golden, remove and place on a baking rack to cool. Don't cut it for at least twenty minutes.

Cutting the galette: There are a number of traditions surrounding this. (Obviously one of them is warning your dinner guests that one of their pieces of galette has a token in it, and warning them not to bite down hard on anything.  Parents will know best whether they care to include their children in sharing this tradition.) In France, as a precaution against the person cutting the galette giving the token to somebody on purpose, traditionally the youngest guest -- child or adult -- gets underneath the dining table, where they can't see the cutting happening, and calls out the name of the guest to whom each new slice is to be given. Whether you choose to become involved with this portion of the tradition is entirely your business.

In any case, enjoy!

(Additional reading: A beginning fève collector's Fete des Rois in 2011: and another overview of the Epiphany feast in France, the Galette, and the fèves.)