#29 - Cake vs. Pastry

Last week's article was about French viennoiseries and pâtisseries, and how both would usually be called "pastries" in English--but not all of them.  Specifically, a lot of pâtisseries would more accurately be called "cakes."  So what's the difference?


To an English-speaker, a "pastry" is usually an individual-sized treat made of sweet or buttery dough, and sometimes filled with jam, chocolate, cream, etc.  So a croissant, a chausson aux pommes, an éclair, or even little cakes like these are all "pastries."

C'est une friandise individuelle, avec une pâte sucrée et/ou beurrée, souvent fourrée ou couverte de crème, chocolat, confiture, etc. 

Danish pastries!

And more pastries...

However, these pâtisseries that are cut into pieces are more likely to be called "cake."

Pourtant, un gâteau coupé en morceaux comme ceux-ci, pour nous c'est "cake."

What do French people mean, though, when they talk about un cake?  This is a great example of a faux ami whose meaning got slightly out of sync when it snuck into the French language.  LaRousse.fr defines un cake as:

Gâteau en pâte levée, garni de fruits confits et de raisins secs, moulé en rectangle.
("Cake made with raised dough, garnished with candied fruit and raisins, in a rectangular loaf.")

More generally, I've heard un cake used to mean any kind of sweet bread: banana bread, zucchini bread, cranberry bread, etc.  In a few special cases we might also call it "cake," as with marble cake--but in French there's a (mostly) clear distinction between un cake:

Des gâteaux:

And pâtisseries!