Madeleines

Every time I visited a thrift store in the last year or so, I kept an eye out for a madeleine pan. One finally turned up about a week ago. I tried a couple recipes on my brother, who has been to France and eaten the madeleines there. The recipe he says tastes more French is from http://www.mercotte.fr/2008/09/30/pas-de-doute-il-ny-a-pas-de-recette-de-madeleine-sur-ce-blog/. Since it is in French and Celsius, I will translate it. I also had different cook times because I think my oven is hotter.

Yield: Between 30 and 36, depending on how much batter is used for each.

Ingredients:
3 eggs
250g flour
200g sugar OR 80g sugar and 40g honey
125g butter (about a stick and an eigth)
50g milk
10g baking powder (about 2 tsp)
1 sachet of vanilla sugar

I don't have vanilla sugar, so I just put in a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. Using a mixture of honey and sugar makes moister madeleines. The first time i made them, I only used sugar, and they were drier than I would have liked. The second time, I replaced three of the spoonfuls of sugar with one spoonful of honey, and they were nice and moist.

Special equipment: A madeleine pan. I found a recipe in English that suggests using a mini muffin pan if you don't have a madeleine pan.

Mix the eggs, flour, sugar, milk, baking powder and vanilla until the batter is smooth. Add the melted butter and stir for about a minute. Cover with a dish towel and let it rest for two hours at room temperature.

The mixture contains milk and eggs, so I checked to make sure it was okay to leave it out. Apparently egg dough can rest for up to two hours unrefrigerated, which is just right for this.

Preheat the oven to 425° F (220° C). Butter the madeleine pan (or pans). Butter it even if it is nonstick. I forgot to butter mine once, and the bottoms broke off and stayed stuck to the pan when I tried to get them out. Fill the madeleine molds up halfway with batter.

Bake them for 5 or 6 minutes at 425° F, then turn down the temperature to 390° F (200° C) and bake for two and a half to four minutes. They are done when the edges are turning brown.

I used a chopstick to get the madeleines out of the pan because it is thin and won't scratch nonstick. They should come out pretty easily if the pan was buttered. While you preheat the oven back to 425° for the next batch, you can wipe the crumbs off the pan with a paper towel and put in more batter.

The sea shell shape from the madeleine pan (And lines from the cooling rack)

The final result after I ate five or six of them:

This batch made thirty-three madeleines. The previous one with the same amount of ingredients made thirty-six.