In the course of my baking with the original Tuesdays With Dorie baking group, I've had several opportunities to use my little 6-well madeleine mold from Pairs. We've baked various flavors of madeleines from Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking From My Home to Yours: chocolate, tea infused, and honey, brown sugar and lemon. But the classic plain madeleine recipe in the book was chosen for the group before I joined.
Now that I'm busy catching up on all of the recipes from Dorie's book that I missed four years ago, this week brought me to the basic madeleine, baked by the TWD bakers 4 years ago this week. Not only did this give me a chance to try one of the quintessentially French recipes in the book, it also presented the opportunity to use all of my previous experience to try for madeleines with maximum "humps" on their ridged backs.
n.o.e.'s notes:
- Click here for the recipe, on the blog of one of the early TWD host, Tara of the blog Smells Like Home.
- From previous experience with Dorie's recipes for madeleines, I have learned that half recipe makes enough batter to just over-fill my particular madeleine pan with its six wells. I tried to remind myself that it is deceptively easy to put too much batter in the wells and purposefully left a bit in the bowl. It turned out to be almost the perfect amount of batter in each well.
- I also remembered (as I had not the last time I baked madeleines) that on her blog Dorie had given a few new tips for baking madeleines so that they would puff even more while baking, producing a profligate hump. I followed her suggestion to place the madeleine pan on a hot baking stone in the pre-heated oven. I did this, and voila! My madeleines formed beautiful puffed shapes as they baked.
the verdict:
These madeleines were easy to mix up, fun to bake, and delicious to eat. I had forgotten the delicate pleasure of eating a madeleine with a cup of hot tea, but this recipe brought it all back. And I was very glad to finally bake the basic classic.
5 comments:
You're a madeleine expert - they are perfection! I don't enjoy eating them enough to make them very often so I am definitely very much a novice.
Oh, you and Proust, eating a mad with tea and bringing it all back...I can't wait to see the volumes of literature you write as a result! Your mads are perfect!
These were fun to make weren't they. I made these and the other two I missed. Love using that pan. Yours are lovely and the hump looks perfect. I will have to remember that tip from Dorie.
Definitel making these again. Gotta justify that pan!!!!
They look absolutely perfect! I've been meaning to christen my madeleine tin forever. I never had the chance to make these when I was a member of TWD (seems like such a long time ago!) but now I actually own a tin there is really no excuse! :-)
I need to make madeleines more often. We were talking about it last weekend. Central Market had two weeks of focusing on French foods, and they had mads in the bakery. The girls were excited because we can make them ourselves. =)
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