La Madeleine
The formidable French tea cake-cookie, it is one of those quintessential, perfect recipes that simply has it all. It's relatively simple to make, tastes like heaven, and has the power to conjure up feelings of both comfort and newness. It's one of those rare perfect bites. The butter takes center stage, followed by subtle sweetness, the complexity of vanilla, and just a hint of salt. You can dress it up a variety of ways (once I topped them with diced nectarines, fresh mint, and crème fraiche for a Sunday brunch in the alley), but the madeleine doesn't really need it.
As a lover of literature, it brings me great joy when customers reference Proust when ordering madeleines. They are referring to an excerpt from Proust's Swann's Way, in which a single bite of a madeleine (dunked in tea), completely transports the narrator and inextricably elevates an otherwise dull day. The moments that change us are rarely the ones we see coming. Take a minute and read this short excerpt (underneath the recipe), it's worth it, I promise. Then go straight-away and make this cookie and let this small wonder transform.
Madeleines
yields 22-24 teacakes
Ingredients
1 ½ Cups Cherbourg Bakery flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
6 ounces (1½ sticks) butter
3 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
¾ Cup sugar
1 ½ teaspoons good vanilla
Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter and flour madeleine pans.
Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.
In a medium bowl cream the butter well. (your goal is to create air pockets in the butter). Add the sugar and vanilla, mix well.
Add eggs one at a time, mixing well between each including the egg yolk.
Fold the flour mixture gently in two parts into the egg mixture until incorporated.
Fill the madeleine molds ¾ way full with a spoon or rubber spatula, this can be tricky, but don’t give up. Then smooth with a butter knife or an off-set spatula.
Bake for 8-9 minutes until golden on the tops and edges.
Let cool slightly and using the tip of a butter knife loosen each cake and flip in the pan.
Lightly dust with confectioner’s sugar.
“…when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory ... Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake..."
-Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Be Sweet &
See you soon.
Geri
