Lavender Madeleines

On our honeymoon, I told J I wanted to learn how to be a better baker. The stand mixer I received as a shower gift plus an accurate thermometer we installed in our oven have helped me greatly in this endeavor. The pièce de résistance on my journey to Avid Madeleine Baker is, of course, the madeleine pan J bought for me. The first experiment failed, but I've since gotten into my groove! In keeping with the pre-Bastille Day French theme on the blog this week, I'm sharing my Provençal twist to this classic French pastry.

For this recipe, I loosely followed and halved Martha's vanilla madeleines recipe and cut out the brown sugar and vanilla, so it went like this:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Salt
3 eggs, room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 stick unsalted butter
1 tablespoon dried lavender buds

First things first I'm the realest, I melted the butter slowly in a saucepan. Right before it all became liquid, I rubbed a bunch of the lavender between my palms to kind of wake up the scent and flavor. I thought that the warmth of the melted butter would further release the lavender essence. Into the pool they went!

While the butter cooled down a bit, I mixed the flour, baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a bowl. Then, I whisked the eggs and sugar in the stand mixer until they got nice and frothy.

After that, fold in the dry ingredients, and once they're combined, pour in the melted butter. Mix just until everything is well incorporated and then stop. Madeleines are supposed to be fluffy and airy and over-mixing them will make them really thick and dense.

Recipe to recipe, the time you're supposed to let your batter rest differs. I basically just put mine aside until I'd finished preparing my pan and the oven had preheated. I rubbed mine down with butter, dusted with flower, and then scooped delicate spoonfuls of batter into the shells.

I love how the lavender flowers not only flavor the butter and the batter, but they're adding such a pretty color element as well. Bake at 375 degrees and start watching them closely after about 8 - 10 minutes. You'll want them to puff up a bit in the middle and turn golden brown around the edges.

Turn out on to a cooling rack. If you like, you can cover them with powdered sugar, but I decided to leave them plain - they are sweet enough already!

Golden, delicate pillows of cake. They are absolument magnifique.

If you've never tried baking madeleines, or if you're trying a new flavor iteration of them, I highly recommend my baking queen Martha. I've found that Queen Stewart's Madeleines 101 guide is really helpful for both a standard recipe or when you want to make flavor/ingredient substitutions.

I hope my French recipes this week have inspired you a bit - there's one more francophilic offering coming on Monday. Bon weekend!