My Favourite Two-Ingredient Breton Dessert

Thick Breton yogurt, a little dessert cream, and absolutely no cooking. Sometimes that's all you need.

I love fermented dairy products.

Yogurt, sour cream, fromage blanc. Particularly the thick, rich varieties that don't pretend to be health drinks.

And living in France, especially in Brittany, provides plenty of opportunities to indulge this particular weakness.

Recently, I've become rather fond of an absurdly simple dessert.

It requires exactly two ingredients.

Thick Breton yogurt and dessert cream flavoured with palets bretons.

If you're unfamiliar with palets bretons, they're those wonderful buttery Breton shortbread biscuits. Rich, crumbly and not particularly interested in your calorie budget.

You can also find ready-made dessert creams inspired by their flavour.

And here's what I do.

The entire recipe

Take some good, thick, full-fat yogurt.

Add crème dessert saveur palet breton.

Mix.

That's it.

I usually use two parts yogurt to one part dessert cream, although a 1:1 ratio works beautifully if you want something richer and sweeter.

The interesting part is the balance.

The yogurt has that pleasant fermented acidity.

The dessert cream is sweet, buttery and almost biscuit-like.

Together, they create something much more interesting than either ingredient on its own.

The yogurt cuts through the sweetness, while the dessert cream softens the acidity.

It's creamy, slightly tangy, sweet without being overwhelming, and wonderfully satisfying.

The nougat variation

There's another version I particularly like.

Replace the palet breton cream with nougat-flavoured dessert cream.

Same principle.

Two parts yogurt to one part nougat cream, or equal quantities if you're feeling particularly indulgent.

The nougat version has a different character, with that familiar confectionery sweetness.

And the acidity of the yogurt makes it much less cloying than eating the dessert cream alone.

No additional sugar.

No cooking.

No equipment beyond a bowl and a spoon.

I'm not even sure this qualifies as a recipe.

But I've encountered considerably more complicated desserts that I enjoyed considerably less.

Sometimes the best culinary discovery is simply figuring out which two things taste better together.