Summer holidays as a child were often spent in France, and one of my favourite things about visiting the country was buying the huge bags of madeleines. Small enough you could reasonably eat them in just two mouthfuls, yes, really, but still satisfying enough to feel like you were eating a cake, what’s not to love? I remember watching A Little Paris Kitchen on the box a couple of years ago and watching Rachel Khoo (yes, my obsession with her continues…) and thinking how wonderful to be able to whip up such delicious looking recipes from a tiny kitchen in a corner of Paris. It gave me hope for my then student living ways! Anyway, when I got the book over Christmas I knew I had to make these madeleines, and so with a free weekend I decided to go for it.
Ingredients: eggs//sugar//plain flour//baking powder//honey//milk//butter//lemon zest//icing sugar//raspberries//lemon curd (homemade preferably, but I cheated and got shop bought!)
Taste: Fresh out of the oven these taste like little pieces of heaven, they’re so good. I took them into work and my manager liked the contrast of the sweet lemon curd with the sharp raspberry, high praise indeed!
Time taken: You’re meant to leave these quite a while for the batter to chill in the fridge. I admit to being slightly impatient and not leaving them quite as long as I should have done, but I don’t think that altered them. According to the original recipe they should take about 3 hours, I’d say mine were done in 2.
Likeness to the book: Spot on in my opinion, what do you reckon?
Photo taken from the BBC website
Improvements: Next time I would like to have a go at making my own lemon curd, and seeing if this makes a difference to them.
Cost: I bought a terribly cheap garish jar of lemon curd, probably less than 50p, raspberries are about £2/punnet and you needed a whole punnet, lemons are 30p each, and everything else I had in the cupboard, so I probably spent an additional £3-ish on ingredients on top of what I already had.
Overall score: 5/5. These were well worth a slightly faffy recipe and two years of waiting after seeing Rachel make them on the TV, I’m already trying to think of more reasons to make them.
If you want to have a go at making them yourself, the recipe is on the BBC website. Enjoy!
Stripes and Snapshots 