Madeleines – Quick
Beat the eggs with a whisk, add the sugar and whisk briefly. Pour the flour into a strainer, add the baking soda and salt and tap into the mixture. Add the zest and gentle mix.
Put a lid on the bowl and rest in refrigerator for 1 to 24 hours.
Butter a madeleine pan, and put it somewhere to chill – refrigerator or freezer depending on advance time to baking.
Preheat oven to 400 °F; Drop spoonfuls of batter into the molded Madeleine pan. Don’t spread. Bake for 12 minutes, or until golden brown on the edges. Let cool briefly, and the cookies should magically slide out of the pan.
- 2 eggs
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 2 T melted butter
- 1 cup flour
- 1 t. baking soda
- 1/4 t salt
- zest of one citrus fruit
However, sometimes something goes wrong. And the cookies don’t leave the pan. This wrecks the appearance. The crisp shell shape imparted by the pan gets broken up. Often this is because the pan wasn’t greased and floured in advance, or wasn’t don’t well enough. Or the cookies are under cooked. In the instance today, pre-Bastille Day, where I was making cookies to take to a party of French speakers, the cookies stuck and some fell apart with the effort of coming out of the mold. This failing apart makes me think that me sugar was too coarse — I used a crystalline Turbinado sugar. And I heated it with the butter to melt the crystals before incorporating them in the batter. Bad plan.
On actual Bastille Day I made a batch with regular sugar. I added some ground flax seed for health and color, and the cover photos shows the results. One change I made from the stuck batch was to butter the pan straight out of the drawer, and then put it in the freezer. Notice the butter paper in the image of the pans.
