Madeleines and a Separate Cinnamon Experiment

Well, it's Tuesday and I was all set to post this week's delicious treat made from Dorie Greenspan's great book, Baking from My Home to Yours.  So I made Earl Gray Madeleine's, only to discover that that was last week's pick for the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers.  I guess while I was away in Seattle and Corvallis last week, time marched on!

Since we're in the home stretch of the book, I'm going to share my pictures of my madeleines anyway.  Better late than never!

The recipe I used was Dorie's Earl Gray Madeleines which attempt to flavor the little sponge cakes with Earl Gray tea.  The technique is to melt the butter and then put the tea leaves into the melted butter and allow it to infuse for 15 minutes.  Then you put the tea and melted butter through a cheese-cloth lined strainer.  (That would have been a good photo to shoot!)  The other flavor used in these cookies is lemon zest, which my husband thinks is the dominant flavor.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As it happens, Dorie herself referred to madeleines in her blog post today!  To get them puffy, her recent discovery is to place plastic wrap on the batter and refrigerate it for an hour, then spoon the batter into the pans, cover with plastic again, and refrigerate for another hour.  Then put a baking sheet in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Then pop in the pans and bake.  This is the suggestion she learned from  Phillippe Conticini of Patisserie des Reves in Paris.  


Here's what I did:

In the cute little mini madeleine pan

In my silicone madeleine pan

The mini madeleines

Minis next to the regulars

The interesting occurrence was the uneven baking.  Notice how some of the mini madeleines are browner than others?  And notice the brown stripe on the regular-sized madeleines?  What's with this?

I sprinkled them all with powdered sugar and they were very much enjoyed.  But I have to figure out my oven.

Since I'm a week late with my post, I might as well share a non-Dorie but very interesting experiment.  When visiting my son and his wonderful girlfriend Rose in Corvallis last week, I brought them a present of four different cinnamon's from Penzey's, one each from Ceylon, China, Indonesia, and Viet Nam.  Wonderful Rose saw this as a perfect opportunity to do a taste test of cinnamon rolls and what a wonderful experiment it was!

The four kinds of cinnamon

Rose rolling out the dough

Four different cinnamon/sugar mixtures

And raisins

Rolls rising

Can't you just smell them?!!!

The cinnamons definitely had distinctive tastes and all were yummy.  Our preference was the Chinese cinnamon in the cinnamon rolls.  The Vietnamese had a more robust flavor--almost too much for cinnamon rolls but outstanding in Dorie's Double Apple Bundt Cake.  The Ceylon and Indonesian cinnamons were unique, but not as tasty as the Chinese.

Hopefully I'll be back on track next week!  The Tuesdays with Dorie bakers will finish up the book this month.  I am a bit behind with 20 recipes left to bake.  I will finish, but not this month!