Recommendations
Butter cake with De IJsvogel Oude Genever
On the plate is a block of boterkoek: three hundred grams of flour, two hundred and fifty grams of muscovado sugar and two hundred and fifty grams of butter, with a criss-cross-scored egg cup, chilled for five hours until it breaks instead of bends. Set against it is an old genever from Arcen that spent two years on casks from a strong Belgian beer and retains a vanilla tone and a soft taste from them.
From the shelf
The bottle
De IJsvogel Oude Genever comes from the grain distillery De IJsvogel in Arcen in Limburg, a distillery in a historic mill. It is an old genever of 37% vol in a 70 cl bottle, made with twice-distilled malt wine and aged for two years on beer casks of a Belgian strong beer, from which it retains a typical vanilla note and a soft taste. The description gives no exact malt wine share. For the designation old genever, the legal requirement is at least 35% vol and at least 15% of the alcohol from malt wine.
The combination
Why this works together
Boterkoek, the Dutch butter cake, is really butter with sugar and just enough flour to make a cake of it; the muscovado sugar adds a molasses-like, almost caramel depth to that. That is sweet on sweet, and a young jenever does not belong next to it, because it would only set cold alcohol against a rich cake. This old genever from De IJsvogel has spent two years in heavy-beer casks, and it is precisely those casks that give off vanilla. Vanilla and muscovado belong to the same flavour family as caramel and molasses, and so the glass runs alongside the cake instead of against it. The malt wine brings the grain-sweet roundness that catches the flour in a sandy boterkoek, and the 37% abv is just enough to lift the butter fat from the palate. That makes the second piece taste as gentle as the first.
At the table
The dish
- For 4 people
- Ready in 20 minutes, plus 1 hour chilling, 35 minutes in the oven and 4 hours cooling
- Type dessert
What you need
- 300 g strong bread flour
- 250 g white muscovado sugar
- 250 g unsalted butter
- 1 pinch of salt
- 1 medium egg
- a baking tin of 18 by 28 cm
- baking paper, plastic wrap and a pastry brush
How to make it
- Sift the flour and the sugar into a bowl.
- Cut the butter into three slices, lay them on the flour mixture and chop them into small pieces with two knives.
- Add the salt and quickly knead everything with cold hands into a ball of dough. Wrap the ball in foil and chill it for at least 1 hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180 °C and line the baking tin with baking paper.
- Spread the dough evenly over the tin and smooth it with the back of a spoon.
- Beat the egg and brush it over the top. Score a diamond pattern into it with a knife, so that the egg does not slide off the dough.
- Bake the boterkoek for 30 to 35 minutes until golden brown and let it cool for at least 4 hours before cutting it into cubes.
In the glass
Serving
Pour De IJsvogel at room temperature into a tulip glass, filled to the brim. The vanilla from the beer casks is the reason to reach for this glass, and it only really opens up at around 18 °C; chilled, nothing of the cask is left. Keep it to one small glass with a small piece of cake, because butter cake and jenever are both rich.
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