Baking Bouchon - Recipe 5: Madeleines

Lookie what I got on sale!

Don't you love it when you walk into a store, quickly find the one thing you need and get it to the register only to discover it's on sale?  Of course you do, surprise discounts are better than expected discounts.  If you're in need of a madeleine pan, get yourself to Williams Sonoma STAT... $9.99 people.  I bet you could use this pan for any cute little cake or whoopie pie type thing.  Come to think of it, I should have checked if other stuff was on sale.

This is the first special piece of equipment I've had to buy as I'm cooking my way through the Bouchon Bakery book and I have a sneaking suspicion it won't be my last.

Guess what? Madeleines are really just little yellow cakes.  Tasty yellow cakes, but yellow cakes non the less.  I had to make 2 adjustments to the recipe.

1. I substituted agave for the honey in the recipe.  Right before mixing this batter, I used all the remaining honey I had in a Kale Salad.  There's only 1 1/4 tsp so I figured it would be fine and it was.

2.  The recipe called for lemon oil which I didn't have, so I used 1/8 tsp of lemon extract.  Just enough to give it a slight lemon flavor.  This substitution also worked just fine.

 The batter came together pretty easily.  I love watching ingredients transform - the first photo above is what happens when you beat the crap out of eggs and sugar.  It all emulsifies together and doubles in size.  Science.

I've come to expect now that I have to refrigerate everything overnight.  This batter was no exception so it went into a plastic container and got chilly.  In the photo above you can see what the batter looked like when I went to scoop it out this morning.  It had these cool air pockets inside of it from the leavening starting to work.  More science.

These little buddies baked up so cute.  I'm a big fan of things in miniature (or giant) so these are right up my alley.  They really do taste like yellow cake... if only I had some chocolate icing to put them.

Julie

PS - here's the recipe posted on USA Today if you're interested.