French dessert of fruit encased in sweet batter / SAT 10-17-20 / Pattern of five shapes arranged like this puzzle's central black squares / Roman's foe in Gallic Wars / Whence a memorable emperor's fall / Morocco's next-largest city after Casablanca / Language from which peyote comes

Constructor: Victor Barocas and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (6:40)

THEME: QUINCUNX / PLUS SIGN (1A: Pattern of five shapes arranged like this puzzle's central black squares / 62A: One of five depicted in this puzzle) — two answers refer to the five black-square formations seen in the grid (the rest of the grid is mercifully themeless)

Word of the Day: CLAFOUTI (36D: French dessert of fruit encased in sweet batter) —

Clafoutis (French pronunciation: ​[klafuti]; Occitan: clafotís [klafuˈtis] or [kʎafuˈtiː]), sometimes spelled clafouti in Anglophone countries, is a baked French dessert of fruit, traditionally black cherries, arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a thick flan-like batter. The clafoutis is dusted with powdered sugar and served lukewarm, sometimes with cream.

A traditional Limousin clafoutis contains not only the flesh of the cherries used, but also the nut-like kernels in the stones. Cherry kernels contain benzaldehyde, the compound responsible for the dominant flavour in almond extract. They also contain a small amount of amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside - a compound potentially capable of releasing cyanide if consumed, but non-toxic in small quantities. (wikipedia)

I saw Brad Wilber's name on the byline and thought it would be on the tougher side for me, since he will inevitably throw some fancy / exotic / foreign vocabulary I've never heard of before in there because he reads more than you and me put together and he's just smart that way. And sure enough, there it was, bam, QUINCUNX (!?!?), bam, CLAFOUTI ... and yet my time was totally normal for a Saturday, so I learned a couple new words without too much aggravation, which is just fine with me. I was much more aggravated by AES and HOBS and ENE and a little bit by FES (mostly because I thought it was spelled FEZ) (58D: Morocco's next-largest city after Casablanca). But I very much liked "I DON'T LIKE TO BRAG" and "RETURN OF THE JEDI," and NAHUATL (40D: Language from which peyote comes) and XANADU (8D: Site of Coleridge's "stately pleasure-dome") and SPIT TAKE (14D: Reaction to an unexpected joke) were pretty snazzy as well (for the record, this is the only way in which I will accept "SPIT" in my puzzle). I'm very much not a fan of themes on Saturday (or Friday), as they tend to be themed enough to restrict the quality of the fill but not themed enough to really be worth it. Today's theme was kind of a shrug for me. A push. A wash. I didn't care about it. It's fine.