Baking Bouchon - Recipe 61: Madeleine Cake

Somebody bring me a tissue.  I'm bored to tears by this cake.  After making rum cake, coffee cake, gingerbread and parfaits, I was expecting the cakes in this chapter to get more complex.  This one is not.  It's just lemon cake.

To be fair, I think it's just in the cookbook because there is a scaled down version of this recipe that makes a thinner cake that is used in the Lemon Meringue Tarts that are coming up in the tart chapter.  I thought about skipping the big cake and just making this when I make the tarts but CA convinced me that it was cheating.  He's so honorable.

I made a pretty big substitution in this recipe replacing all of the Glucose syrup with Light Corn Syrup.  I did a lot of research online before making the decision to do this.  I was out of Glucose syrup and last time I bought it I had to order it online and I am too impatient to do that again.  My research suggested that corn syrup could replace glucose 1 for 1 so I went for it.  I turned out just fine.  I kind of figured that it would be a disaster and I'd have a great story for you, but no dice.

To make the butter the glucose/corn syrup is melted with better and then mixed with whipped eggs and sugar.  Flour, baking powder and milk are added and then, finally, fresh lemon juice. 

The batter gets spread onto a quarter sheet pan and baked.  Thomas recommends refrigerating or freezing the cake before using it.  I chose a day wrapped in plastic wrap in the refrigerator.  Unfortunately, when I unwrapped it, it got ugly.

Thomas recommends serving this with seasonal fruit.  I happened to find some rather large blackberries and some raspberries at the store and they paired nicely with the cake.   A little dollop of whipped cream finished it off.
 
The texture of this cake is nice, tender and fluffy.

The flavor of this cake has nice and lemony.

The color of this cake is nice and golden.

It's nice...

BUT I'M SO BORED BY IT!

CA liked it - but he liked it better without the whipped cream and berries, he said they took away from the lemony flavor.

I ate a slice so I could say that I did and put the rest of it in the freezer.  I plan to crumble it up eventually and make cake balls out of it.  Cake balls are not boring.

Enjoy!
Julie