Madeleine recipe

You will need
90 grams butter, 90 grams flour, 75 grams granulated white sugar, 10 grams brown sugar, a tablespoon of honey (it is the ingredient which will flavour your madeleines, so choose it carefully), 2 eggs, salt. Butter for the mould.
And madeleine molds.

The recipe

Melt the butter.

In a bowl, whisk together sugar, eggs and a pinc of salt. When the mixture whitens, add progressively the flour and mix with a wooden spoon. Then add butter and honey and mix smoothly. Put in the fridge half an hour.

Take out of the fridge half an hour before baking.

Preheat the oven 200°c.

Butter the madeleine's mould . Put a full tablespoon of batter in each mold.

Cook five to ten minutes (depends on the size of the molds). The cakes have to be lightly golden and swollen in their middle.

In France, we never dust madeleines with confectionners sugar.

If you want to change, you can separate the batter in two parts and add a spoon of cacao (powder) in one part and half a spoon of sugar. And you put the two sorts of batter in each mould.

Enjoy

In 1755, following a quarrel with the maître d'hô, the baker of the duke of Lorraine, Stanislas, left suddenly the kitchen. A party was given and no desert ready for the guests ! The majordomo asked a young maidservant to cook her grand mother's specialty, little yellow potbellied shells. Since then, this desert wears her name.

The exquisite taste of the madeleine has been lengthy and magnificently described by Marcel Proust "... She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses,..."

And what a pleasure to see a small tummy growing suddenly in the middle of the cake.