A Food Fair Review. The Petit Madeleine

This pretty and delicious French cake that is the petit madeleine was my choice of dish to make for the class food fair. A madeleine is a buttery French shell-shaped cake. Made of sugar, eggs, flour, vanilla essence and butter, and placed into a shell cake mold to bake, it is not too sweet but not too plain.

Madeleines are very similar in taste to a sponge cake but more versatile because you can eat these almost anywhere because of their bite size pieces. I know this for a fact because I once tried to consume cake on the train and ended up with a completely new type of cake when the train came to a sudden halt. Floor cake.

I had always pictured French sweets to be extreme works of art that tasted as good as it looked. Like Swann’s experience of tasting a madeleine, the protagonist in Marcel Prousts’s Remembrance of Things Past, my experience with madeleines was in a way, magical. Magical in the sense that it was almost misleading such a simple looking cake could taste so delicious with its crunchy exterior and fluffy inside. In an attempt to share that tastiness with everyone, I had chosen to make this cake.  

Madeleines in their shell baking molds. 

Despite its dainty size and small number of ingredients, making madeleines required more patience and careful instruction following than I expected. The biggest challenge was developing a light and airy batter. Not sifting the flour and over-folding would activate the gluten in the flour resulting in a tough batter. This leads to a tough madeleine. This led to my first batch out the kitchen. I then proceeded to make a second successful batch to not beat but to fold my batter gently and sift this time. 

 I presented the madeleines as they were: simple cakes sitting next to each other with nothing but dusted icing sugar. I was glad that they were well received as none were left at the end of the food fair and I was complimented as to how soft and fluffy yet slightly crunchy they were.  Score.