"La petite madeleine"

Because I am, as we have already established, broken as a student, about a week ago my mum and I sat down and looked through the Lakeland catalogue, making a wishlist like children at Christmas. Something I've noticed about Lakeland is that for every item that you wonder when one would actually have need for such a thing (banana guard), there will be something that you don't need but have to have (silicone cupcake cases that look like flowerpots), and something that you absolutely need in your life right this second. For me, that was a silicone madeleine tray.

Marcel Proust wrote about the experience of dunking a madeleine into a cup of tea, and how this simple act took him back to his childood in the first part (Du côté de chez Swann) of his unnecessarily long work, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Since then, the delicious treats have become synonymous with French childhoods - possibly helped along by the famous little girl who lived in an old house in Paris all covered in vines...

This weekend, as the weather has been ridiculous, making some lovely treats to make me feel like I was in Paris was really the only thing to do.

I looked all over the internet for a suitable recipe for my little madeleines but the ones I found seemed lacking in something. There were a couple that sounded lovely but I couldn't make as I was missing some ingredients (ginger madeleines, you will be mine!), but some seemed to have too much butter, or too much flour, or too many eggs. Getting thoroughly fed up, I suddenly had a brainwave. "Hey!" I thought, "I speak French. Let's put my degree to good use by looking up a French recipe." For surely, surely, if something is so quintessentially French and appears to be the Gallic equivalent of making fairy cakes, then every French person would have a suitable recipe, right?

Happily my theory was correct and here is my translation of the one I found and used, which originally came from here. This makes 48 mini madeleines from this mould, and would make around 20 normal-sized madeleines 

2 eggs

150g flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

125g butter

150g sugar

Zest of one lemon

1. Mix together the eggs and sugar until the mixture is frothy.
2. Melt the butter completely, then add to the egg and sugar mixture.
3. Sift in the flour and baking powder gradually, stirring well to ensure everything's well mixed.
4. Add the lemon zest or, if you prefer, 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract.
5. Spoon into the madeleine moulds and bake in the top half of an oven set to 200 degrees (that's for a fan oven) for 5-7 minutes.

I was incredibly grateful to have had warning that the mixture is incredibly liquid - probably due to melting the butter rather than just softening it - and if you're making mini ones, the ten minutes it takes for the first batch to bake, cool and for a few to be eaten is just long enough for the mixture to firm up a bit. A few recipes I found advocated letting the batter sit in a fridge for anything from 2 hours to the entire night - but honestly I couldn't say I noticed a difference in taste between the ones that were baked right after the batter had been mixed and the ones where the batter had rested.

Yummy, especially just out of the oven, and also pretty divine dipped into a cup of tea - particularly the next day when they'd gone all sticky. Maybe Proust did know what he was going on about after all.