French Madeleine Cookies Recipe

Let's start with our mocha madeleines. In this lesson, we're going to learn the ribbon sponge technique. We're gonna learn how to properly prepare our classic madeleine pan, and then we're gonna cover piping and baking our madeleines to perfection. First things first. Madeleines are notorious for sticking, and we basically spray. You can also brush the pan with melted butter if you don't wanna use pan spray. Now for the mocha madeleine I'm going to dust my pan with cocoa. You have to sift the cocoa or the flour over the madeleine pan. It does get messy. I have a wonderful setup here with the baking tray and some parchment paper. Maybe throw down some parchment paper and control the mess. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm going to tap out the excess cocoa. And can you see where even with the spray and the cocoa, we have these naked spots? That's where the madeleines are gonna stick. And right here is where madeleines get a bad wrap. They can be little stickers. So we're gonna go ahead and spray again. And another dusting of cocoa powder. And your pan should look just like that. Don't lose your sifter. Let's talk a little bit about our ingredients for this recipe. I have my melted butter, not too hot, not too cold. My whole eggs, sugar, baking powder, salt, all-purpose flour, cocoa, vanilla, and espresso powder. So the first thing I'm gonna do is sift together all my dry ingredients, except the sugar. Now, one very important thing. Whenever you are working with cocoa and flour and you're sifting, it's very important that you sift as many times as it takes for the mixture to be uniform because you don't want any pockets of unmixed cocoa or baking powder. That looks great. Just gonna set this aside. Now, in my mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, I'm going to put in my eggs, my sugar and my vanilla. Now we're going to mix the egg, sugar and vanilla for quite a while. I'm gonna start on medium speed to mix. Then I'm going to scrape down the bowl, and then it's going to go on high speed for about 10 minutes. It should nearly quadruple in volume, triple to quadruple in volume. Quadruple might be a little too much, but it's definitely going to triple. So now I'm gonna stop here 'cause I wanna make sure that there's no sugar on the side of the bowl. Scrape down quickly. No rogue egg yolk flying up there. Here we go. Lock it in place. Full speed. I'm stopping the mixer here 'cause I wanna show you something. Right now, the mixture looks light, fluffy, and voluminous. And you might think that it's ready, but it's not. So when you see it look like this, it looks good, but you still have a ways to go. Now let's take a look at this. We are almost there, but not quite. The reason this is called the ribbon method is because when the eggs and the sugar come up to full volume you should be able to take some of the batter, and holding the whisk about four inches from the surface, you should be able to make a squiggly, do your initial, B is for baking, whatever you want, some sort of design on the surface and that design should hold for three seconds. I'm close, but not there yet. So this is gonna go back on the mixer for about a minute and a half. And the nice thing about eggs and sugar, or egg yolks and sugar, as opposed to egg whites, it's really difficult to over mix them. So don't worry about that. All right. I think this is looking pretty good. One thing I want to mention. When you download your recipe for the mocha madeleines, there is optional rum, and that rum would go in with the vanilla. But as I said, it's optional. So let's test this. Four inches from the top. I'm making a big circle. Count one, two, three, still holding. Nice and fluffy. Look at that. This is exactly how it should look. If you have any doubt, put it back on the mixer for one or two minutes, because this is what's going to cause our madeleines, it's going to help our madeleines rise beautifully. Okay, now all I have to do is add my butter and my dry ingredients. So I'm gonna alternate dry, butter, dry, butter, finish with the dry. So here we go. Add one-third of the dry. Just eyeball it. There's no need to measure it. Shake this down. Okay, now we're gonna fold. I use a J-motion when I fold. I slice through the batter and spin the bowl. So just like that. Okay, now I'm gonna add half my butter. Gonna mix this. Now the other third, the second third of the flour. Okay. This technique for folding is very efficient. Otherwise what happens is we start stirring, and that's fine in savory cooking. The last half of the butter is going in. But, here I'll show you. If we were to stir, stir, stir, our ingredients fall into the center of the bowl and we lose volume. There's our last bit of cocoa and flour. I have to add the ingredients in this in increments because if I didn't, the batter would become quite overworked to get all of those ingredients in there at once. So let's take a look at it. I have a few streaks of butter here, but no flour on the bottom. So I'm just gonna give it a few more. There we go. Look closely. There we go. Last streak, but try not to overwork it. Okay, great. Get this out of the way. This is exactly what your batter should look like. Now we're going to fill our piping bag. I have an 18-inch disposable bag. You can use a reusable bag. That's just fine. There's no need for a tip. I'm gonna cut the bag after I fill it. It's awfully nice to have a support. This is just a 32-ounce deli cup. I'm gonna plop all my batter into my piping bag. Here we go. Now I'm gonna show you one of the most important techniques of this class. For this technique, you need something called a bowl scraper. It can look like this. It can be another color, it doesn't matter. But it has to have a flat edge. And it can't be something that's gonna tear your piping bag. So here we go. Now watch this. I'm gonna cut about a half inch. There we go. I'm gonna take the bowl scraper, and I'm gonna push the batter toward the tip of the bag. And that way, when I pick up the bag, batter, bag, nice and clean. I grab the bag with the C of my hand. Okay? Twist, twist, and remember whatever we're piping, you're squeezing from the top. Squeeze from the top and support with your other hand. Very, very important. Resist the urge to squeeze the bag anywhere else, except from the top. I made a mess, but it's worth it to show you. Get that out of the way. And now we are ready to pipe. You notice I have the pan vertical. It helps me not reach over my work, and you wanna fill the madeleines just to the top of the pan. There is a tiny bit over the edge. That's good. And I just squeeze the bag, pull toward myself, and then I pull away. So squeeze, toward, and then way. There, we have it. Our madeleines are piped and they're ready to go into the oven. They will bake at 375 degrees, and we're going to start checking in 12 minutes. Our madeleines are out of the oven. They actually took about 14 minutes. So how do we test for doneness? You can take a skewer and insert it in the center and it should come out clean, or a cake tester. You can also press down on them, and they should spring back, and they look, they look great. So now I'm gonna show you how to get them out of the pan. For this, it's really great if you have an offset spatula, and it's very advisable to let 'em cool for about 10 minutes in the pan before you try to get them out of the pan. So here we go. And you can see here where my batter kinda connected. That's all right. We're just gonna take the little offset, and free them from each other. Get this outta the way. Okay. And then just check to see, uh oh, just check to see, if you can, if they release. And look, they're releasing beautifully. That double spray technique almost never fails. Now those of you with a non-stick pan, you can do that procedure, that spray and flour, or spray and cocoa one time, but don't neglect it, because even non-stick madeleines can stick a little bit. There we go. One more. Beautiful, delicious mocha madeleines.