March 28, 2016

Rich, Buttery Madeleines

When we were in Prague (and I promise, posts about the trip are coming — sorting through photos after a trip is one of my least favorite things in the world, and I’m just taking my time about it), we met up with my friends Stephanie and Joe. Stephanie is my oldest friend. We grew up in the same neighborhood and became very close in high school and have remained so ever since, despite living on separate continents for over a decade. Joe is her husband, who she met in Glasgow, where she lives, and also a good friend of mine. It was B’s first time meeting some of my old world friends — people he already felt like he knew very well, given how often I talk about them. If we hadn’t all jived as a group, for whatever reason, it would’ve been fairly heartbreaking. There was lots of nervousness all around. It meant a lot that things go well.

Luckily, what we realized pretty much immediately is that we had one major thing in common — we all love to eat. (Stephanie actually just started her own food blog, and her photography skills far surpass mine, so you should check it out.) And that is a powerful bonding point when you are on vacation.

So on our second day in Prague, after we crossed over the Charles Bridge, we decided to drop into a gingerbread shop. That’s where I spotted the little seashell molds.

I’m going to be honest — I’ve always been a little afraid to fool around with baking recipes. In general, people usually either prefer cooking or baking. They are different animals. Cooking is instinctual — if you can dream it, you can make it happen. You can fly by the seat of your pants and improvise as you go along — it’s all happening right there in front of your eyes. But baking is, as we’ve all heard a million times, a science. You measure and mix, put it in the oven and pray. You cannot get too screwball with baking, because the magic that comes from the heat is so instrumental to the end result — it’s that heat that you’re courting, and if you violate the rules too severely, you will fail.

But baking can be instinctual, too, and if anything has taught me that, it’s bread. The wild little organisms that live in the bread dough are too unpredictable for you to be uptight. You have to learn how to feel, how to smell and how to trust your hunches. Bread recipes are, by and large, general guidelines. Your particular yeast, the humidity and temperature of the air in your kitchen that day, your local flour — it will all be different from what the person who wrote that recipe was working with.

So I started with bread. And when I felt like I could trust myself with that, I was finally ready to start trusting myself with my own baking recipes.

I wanted madeleines that were less sweet, more buttery and more cake-like in texture. I added lemon juice rather than rind, to increase the acidity, and a touch of almond extract to add a little richness to compliment the butter.

The one thing you gotta be sure of with madeleines is that your molds are buttered and floured well. There’s nothing worse than going through all the trouble of baking something only to have it fall apart at the last minute because it doesn’t come out of the mold or pan in one piece (or at all). It was a messy and monotonous task, to sit and coat each individual shell with butter and tap it over with flour, but it was worth it when the little cakes slid right out when I pulled them out of the oven.

Once they’re done, you can either sift a little powdered sugar over the top, like I did here, or you can melt some chocolate and dip them.

The beauty of madeleines is in their simplicity — one little bite-sized buttery cake, or as Proust put it, in a passage on the function of memory and the senses in Remembrance of Things Past, “the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds”.