Dessert is on the menu this week for French Fridays with Dorie. The recipe is an intruiging goat cheese cake called tourteau de chevre. It wasn’t a cheesecake, in the classic New York deli way. It wasn’t a classic cake either. Even though the eggy, creamy (though creamless) goat cheese filling was poured into an unbaked pastry crust lining a springform pan, it wasn’t really a tart either. It was completely unique.

I had trouble with the sweet shortbread-like pastry crust. When I made the same pastry for the Orange-Almond Tartlets, I pressed it in the shell and it worked perfectly. For this recipe, I refrigerated it overnight and then rolled it out. The pastry wasn’t very cooperative. It kept crumbling as I rolled it. I tried patching it with wet fingers, but it kept on cracking. I ended up with a shaggy square so I used a dinner plate to make a nice circle. Then I was faced with the challenge of how to transfer the fragile sheet of dough to the pan. It didn’t make it one piece, so I had to do still more patching in the pan. Fortunately, while more difficult to work with than I remembered, the pastry was also extremely forgiving. Despite all the handling, the pastry didn’t turnout tough at all.

The filling didn’t look promising when I fired up the mixer. At first, it was sort of thick and gloppy. Within a minute though, the filling had lightened to a smooth, pale buttery yellow, custard. (I know it’s not technical custard, but it reminded me of one.) After folding the fluffy egg whites in, the filling was quite lofty.

I have one of those glass cake dome. I’m always excited when I make something that can be stored at room temperature so I can use it. It feels like there’s a professional bakery in my kitchen, for a day at least.

I served the cake plain, but I think a berry sauce would have been a welcome topping. Maybe for the next slice.

The tourteau de chevre received mixed ratings at our house. I enjoyed it. I’d never had anything like it before. All of its characteristics worked for me, and I was pleased to find that it wasn’t too sweet or heavy. Thumbs up from me! On the other hand, my husband was underwhelmed. Even though I shared Dorie’s warning that this wasn’t going to be classic cheesecake, he was expecting a denser, richer dessert.

The other FFwD bloggers made the same cake this week. You can check out their links at French Fridays with Dorie. We don’t post the recipes, but you can find it in Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table.

I’m excited that I’m playing with pastry two weeks in a row. Next week’s recipe will be Spinach and Bacon Quiche!