Sometime before Christmas, I must have come across a 19th c recipe for Madeleines. It sort of stuck in my mind as I'd never seen a Madeleine pan in any shop I had ever been in. A Madeleine pan is really a single purpose piece of bakeware, and not a small one you can hide in a drawer. This one has 18 decent sized shell shapes and it is as large a a cookie sheet or a big muffin pan. Anyway, I was looking for a particular mug for a present and this outlet store had Madeleine pans of all things. I popped back in last week and they still had them, for $8. I couldn't resist bringing it home with me. I haven't looked for the period Madeleine recipe, but I did adapt a modern one to be gluten and dairy free. Oh MY GOODNESS! This is a single use pan that deserves space in my cupboard. Yes, I could use a little mini-muffin pan. I already have one of those that sits rarely used, but the little shell shaped Madeleines are so pretty and so very delicious!
(dairy/gluten free)
1/4 cup brown rice flour
1/4 cup white rice flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour/starch
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
pinch salt
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
3-4 tbsn vegan margarine
melt the margarine. In a bowl, mix the flours, starch, xanthan gum and salt, stirring well to completely blend them together. In a separate bowl (I used a stand blender) beat the eggs until thick and light. Add the sugar and vanilla to the eggs and keep beating until well blended. Turn the mixer off, add the dry ingredients to the wet and then the melted margarine. Mix until all the dry ingredients are fully incorporated. Pour the batter into a ziplock bag, squeeze out the air and set in the fridge for an hour or so. Oil and flour the pan (I used tapioca starch and that really didn't work all that well) Preheat the oven to 375° F. After the batter has set for an hour, cut the corner off the ziplock bag and pipe it into the Madeleine pan. This really limits the mess but you could use a spoon or a reuseable piping bag as well. This recipe filled all 18 shells with little leftover. Bake for about 8 - 10 minutes until the cakes are browned and spring back when touched gently. Let cool for a few minutes in the pan and then turn out on a rack to finish cooling. When cold, dust with icing sugar or you could dip half in chocolate, however taste testers decided that the chocolate was overkill and these were plenty good enough without.
These are a little too brown but ohhh, they are so delicious.
I always thought they were cookie consistency. They're cakes? So frickin' cute.
ReplyDelete-- Tegan
I honestly love my apple slicer but, then again, I buy about 30 lbs of apples every year. It gets used a lot. :-)
ReplyDeleteThe cakes looks really cute. The pan might be fun to use for candy molds too - marzipan for around a large cake or even frozen buttercream!
I, too, hate having cooking implements that only do one thing, but sometimes you just run across that thing that you absolutely have to have. I would have grabbed that madeleine pan too!
ReplyDeleteI fell for one as well - but I have only used it once so far! the problem is that I won't get far with just one sheet of madeleines, they taste too nice to last long enough:) but I don't think yours are too dark, to me they taste better when a bit darker!
ReplyDeleteand I agree with the apple corer. the one I used to have (and practically never used) cut out the middle, but not properly, so that I always had to follow up with a knife anyway - there's no point then? and these things tend to hide in drawers and on shelves in the back - when I need them, I can never find them... I admit though that I collected far too many chocolate implements, forms, sheets, little shaping tools, cookie cutters etc... everybody has to have one bad habit at least:)