Madeleines With Munchkins - Baking With Children

Madeleine cookies - or really, teacakes

My goal for this post is to write about madeleines without mentioning Proust (again).

Mini-me is obsessed with those little packets of three madeleines sold at the Starbucks' register, so I asked if she'd like to make them at home some day. Of course the answer was yes. Remembering that Heidi of 101cookbooks had run a madeleine recipe over a year ago that looked intriguing, we opted to follow hers rather than Joy of Cooking (or more research).

Looking now, I see the recipes are dramatically different! Joy calls for no lemon zest(!), double the flour to butter ratio(!), uses pastry flour instead of all-purpose, and uses baking powder where Heidi uses none. I guess I'll have to try this version next for comparison. I'm pretty sure the pastry flour at least is a good idea, for a more tender crumb.

They definitely turned out great, it was all we could do to not scarf the whole batch the moment they cooled off. Just the right amount of lemon flavor, and a tender/chewy bite.

Sarina pointed out that they are more like a cake than a cookie, and in fact Joy refers to them as a teacake. The beating of the sugar & eggs is very much like a sponge cake.

Although madeleines seem like a good thing to be a purist about, I could imagine using lime, grapefruit or orange zest instead. You won't catch me making Thai-spiced madeleines with coconut foam though!

Kiddo really enjoyed measuring ingredients, watching the mixer, folding the batter together, and filling the special pan. We brought half the batch over to the neighbors and that was fun too. I think madeleines will be in our regular repertoire because they are really easy but when you offer them to guests or give them as gifts, they seem kinda special!

Here are Amazon links for basic or super-deluxe pans if you want to try your hand at them. I probably wouldn't buy non-stick or silicone because they likely won't brown as well. Just use a good brand of pan spray or butter, they come out easily.

Munchkin filling the molds

Rings Of Saturn On Challah French Toast

"Rings of Saturn" - Saturn peach with French Toast

I recently learned that donut peaches and Saturn peaches are the same thing. I picked up some beautiful specimens at Central Market the other day, perfectly ripe and sweet. They lack the acid backbone of most other varieties. Pure, addictive, three-bite candy.

Of course those names got me thinking. I really wanted to do a homemade donut, but decided to go for the Saturn pun first. Rings.

I opted for a challah French toast base, buttermilk and marionberry sauces, and a scoop of dulce de leche ice cream. Challah makes phenomenal French toast. Probably a tie with brioche. The bites of cold ice cream, tender room temperature peach, and warm French toast were pretty incredible.

The marionberry sauce was subtly spiked with rosewater, black pepper, and cardamom, which added a mysterious element. In retrospect the sauces would have looked more Saturnesque if I had brushed them in wide circles on the plate. Maybe a few crunchy space rocks would have worked too. Praline pecans?

I didn't actually measure anything for this recipe, but I'll give you a rough guide in case you want to make something similar. If you can't find a Saturn peach, you could use half of a regular peach or nectarine, cut in half along the equator. You only need to peel the peach only if the skin is kind of tough. I've offered other suggested substitutions in the body of the recipe.

Rings Of Saturn On Challah French Toast
Serves 4
Vegetarian; not vegan or gluten-free

For the buttermilk sauce:

    This sauce calls for xanthan gum. If you don't have it, you can do without, the sauce will just be a bit runny. You could also use thick Greek yogurt instead of buttermilk.

• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• xanthan gum - start with with 1/8 teaspoon

1. Put all ingredients in a mini food processor or blender. Whir for awhile then check consistency. You want something thick enough to stand up on a plate a bit, but not gelatinous. If this isn't thick enough, add more xanthan gum, a pinch or two at a time. This will make more than you need, it just isn't convenient to work with the gum in smaller quantities.

For the marionberry sauce:

• 1/2 cup marionberry jam (or other jam of your choice)
• 1 teaspoon rosewater (or orange flower water, or omit)
• 1 grind black pepper
• 1 pinch ground cardamom

1. Whisk all ingredients, then force through a sieve to remove lumps and seeds.

For the French toast:

• 2 eggs
• a couple good glugs of milk
• honey (or agave nectar, or sugar)
• pinch of salt
• 4 thickish slices of challah or brioche, cut into circles bigger than your peaches
• butter

1. Thoroughly whisk the first 4 ingredients in a shallow bowl. Soak the bread well on both sides, brush off excess, and cook over moderately low heat in melted butter, flipping when golden brown. You don't want the heat so high that the outside burns before the inside sets. Keep warm.

To serve:

• 4 donut peaches, cored to remove pit (with an apple corer or knife)
• Haagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream (or make your own)

1. Place one piece of French toast in the center of a plate.
2. Top with one peach.
3. Make two concentric rings each of the sauces, either with a squeeze botttle or spoon, or brush the plate.
4. Top the peach with a scoop of the ice cream and push it down into the cylinder where you removed the pit.

Nectarine and Blueberry Tart - Why I Am Not A Pastry Chef

Nectarine and Blueberry Tart

I made this tart with the idea that I'd write a post about how simple it is to make this beautiful and delicious dessert. It is, though it does take a bit of time. Just look up a recipe for a pâte sablée dough and pastry cream, use perfectly ripe fruit and it is going to be good.

But making it really got me thinking about two other things:

• why I'm not cut out to be a pastry chef
• what it takes to make something great, not merely good

Let me tell you all the things wrong with that tart:

• Crust:
  • a little tough - the all-purpose flour I used is probably a bit high in gluten, or I might have overworked the dough.
  • not laying evenly in the pan, pulling away in spots because I stretched it
• Pastry cream:
  • slightly grainy - I let the heat get too high, and then I forced it through the strainer making tiny grains instead of settling for just what would pour through.
  • too much vanilla extract, really should have been made with a vanilla bean, and could have taken a touch of another flavor - like rosemary or lemon verbena or lemon zest.
  • a little too sweet
  • could have been just a touch thicker - kinda oozing more than ideal
• Fruit:
  • nectarines should have been cut more thinly and evenly.
  • fruit should have been tightly overlapped - when I cut into it, the fruit all moved apart and didn't look pretty on the slices.

Now I'm not saying all this because I want you to write in and say "don't be so hard on yourself". It was tasty and we ate every bite. I'm saying it because:

(A) I have the utmost respect for pastry chefs. There is a lot less margin for error in their execution of their dishes than on the savory side, where you have a lot of opportunity to adjust flavors and platings at the last minute. With pastry, your mistakes are usually made much earlier in the game and you can't hide them. I prefer the slightly more improvisational nature of savory, though I think we can all learn from pastry precision.

(B) Sweet or savory, I need to be this picky about the food I made if I eventually want to be serving it to the public. These details are the difference between ok and wow, between that was nice and gotta-tell-my-friends. More fundamentally, it is the difference between how good I am now, working off the cuff, and how high my internal standards are. If I'm not going to cook really, really well, then what is the point?