Getting Started with Madeleines

Day 1! I started out with an easy recipe for madeleines, which are French butter cakes. They have a sweet and lemony flavor and are perfect for summer. The best part is that they use very simple ingredients, and they don't require yeast...that is a little hard to find right now.

I found a plethora of madeleine recipes online, and while they all seemed similar, the majority were "Americanized" with extra flavors in the batter or on top. I was looking for something traditional, so I searched for my recipe in French, as I do when making crêpes. This tested my vocabulary a bit since I'm not familiar with cooking terms, but it's good to pick up on new terms. "Teaspoon," for example, had me stumped, because the French term cuillère à café means "coffee spoon" and is abbreviated c à c. Once I figured out conversions from grams to cups or teaspoons for butter and dry ingredients, the preparation was very quick!

To make madeleines, you need a special pan with seashell-shaped molds. I greased mine with butter and preheated the oven to 375 F...the recipe said 410, but my uneven oven makes things a little hard to predict, so I ended up baking for an extra 2 minutes and that was perfect.

It should be noted that the French use the term mise en place while cooking, meaning "put in place." This means that every ingredient and tool should be ready to go before you start. It makes the process go quickly and allows you to pay attention and enjoy what you are making!

Mise en place for madeleines involves melting a stick of butter (a whole stick!), zesting a lemon, and greasing the molds. Doing these tasks before starting on the batter also helps it maintain a good consistency without fear of overmixing.

Now we're ready to mix! 3/4 cup of sugar is whisked into two whole eggs, yielding a mousse-like blend. After slowly pouring in the butter, you add one cup of flour, roughly a tablespoon at a time to avoid a gummy texture. Once the butter and flour are combined, fold in the lemon zest and half a teaspoon of baking powder.

Pouring the batter into the molds takes time, and it's important to put the same amount in each one because they spill over a bit in the oven. My pan and most others have 16 wells, and it seemed to barely hold all of the batter! I used a large soup spoon to fill each mold with the thick mixture.

I baked for 10 minutes at 375 and found that they were still too soft in the center, so I gave them another 2 minutes and moved them to a baking rack with a silicon spatula to cool. As I mentioned before, my oven cooks unevenly, so I'll have to remember to rotate the pan halfway through baking to ensure that they don't burn.

About halfway in, I opened the door to check on them...they looked very much not like madeleines! Why had the centers sunken in? I figured that I had overfilled the batter, and maybe even doubled the amount that I was supposed to pour in. I let them bake until the timer went off and checked again.

Sigh of relief! These were perfect! A few on the bottom row have indentations from curious finger poking, but they fluffed up just as they should. It was hard to fill the molds evenly, but I had no trouble separating the conjoined twins, and they came out with no effort.

Success! I will definitely be making these again soon. They were so easy and took about 45 minutes, including baking time, and they cool very quickly. The ingredients are very basic and inexpensive. And most importantly, they taste fantastic :)