Monday 3 August 2015

My Inspiration from the Lemon and Raspberry Madeleines


So, as promised, I am blogging now about how Rachel Khoo's Lemon Raspberry Madeleines inspired me to make them in my own different way. Not Madeleines, but following the same recipe and path in a way.

These I feel would be great for kid's parties, dinner parties or any gathering where bite-sized food is required. I feel these are sure to get your taste buds tingling and they are, in my opinion adorable.

The first thing you need to do is preheat the oven to 180C in a fan assisted oven and then grease your bun tray.

This time I will be using an extra small muffin tray. These make mini muffins. You want to butter this all over with melted butter. This will be about 2 tbsp of butter as it is a larger surface area than the Madeleine tin was.

Once you have it buttered leave aside and get ready to make the dough again. Although, now that I think of it, the dough that I made for the Madeleienes was enough for this recipe as well.

This recipe makes 12 Madeleines and 20 mini lemon and raspberry cakes.

By the way, you won't need to flour the tin this time, as I felt it wasn't needed due to the size and the amount of butter I used. But if you still want it, that's cool!

The ingredients for the dough again are;

- 200g Melted Butter

Melt this in a pan until melted completely and then set aside.

- 130g Caster Sugar
- 3 Free- Range Eggs

Whisk this together until thick- measurement of how thick is in previous post- please don't make me run through that again?

- 200g Plain Flour
- 1 tsp Baking Powder
- 1 Lemon- Zest only

Tip this into the 'eggy' mixture and whisk in until combined.

- A dribble of Maple Syrup or Honey
- 60 ml of Milk

Whisk this in and then give the batter one last whisk to ensure everything is combined.

(This is purely so that you know what your batter should contain. Likelihood is that you'll have batter left over if you have made as many Madeleines that I have.)

Your batter should be in the fridge from being left over and keeping cool. Put this into a piping bag and pipe into each little mould in the muffin/ mini cake tin.




Once you have filled all your batter will allow- mine gave me 20 mini cakes, put a raspberry on top of each one and put into the oven to bake for around 15 minutes or until golden-brown and bouncy to the touch.

Take these out of the oven and pipe in a little lemon curd to each mini cake. Leave to cool completely. Use a knife or something thin and small to loosen the rim of the little cakes more to be able to pop them out of their moulds. Put them onto a cooling rack to sit for 10 minutes and then put onto a plate or serve immediately once out of the moulds.


To really make these my own, I popped a little raspberry on top after being baked (the lemon curd stuck it on) and served them along side a few raspberries, well 3.

These lemon and raspberry cakes were my slightly more grown up take on Top Hats. If you don't know what these are, then I assume you had no childhood, or a very bleak and sad one at that. Top hats were the dessert Cushla and I would drool over. They were full of charm and happiness!



They were these little marshmallows topped with chocolate and smarties to make them look all sophisticated in their little hats.

Making these little cakes topped with raspberries are my grown up version of the Top Hat.

Alternatively if you don't want lemon or your kids don't like lemon either, you could bake these little cakes without the zest, then with a teaspoon, after they are baked of course, scoop out a little hole and eat it. Then pipe the hollow space with ganache or caramel.

Top this with a quenelle of whipped cream and a raspberry. Chocolate/ Caramel and raspberries and cream are great friends and pair well together.

For the ganache;

- 200g Chocolate- whatever kind you like, but I would recommend 100g milk and 100g dark. As that gives a great balance between bitter and sweet. White can be done, but is notoriously hard to melt sometimes.

- 200g Cream.

- Knob of Butter.
- Dash of Vanilla Extract.
- Pinch of Salt.

Heat the cream until just before boiling. Add the chocolate, broken up into little pieces. Add the butter, vanilla and salt and give a good mix.

Cover and leave to thicken before piping into the cakes.

                                       OR

Buy a jar of salted caramel or any caramel that is thick enough to pipe and pipe into each one.

Or do a mix, some raspberry and lemon, some chocolate, cream and raspberry and some caramel, cream and raspberry.

Well, that is my inspiration and my own take on the Madeleine, making it more me and less fancy I guess. Something you can flump on the sofa with and watch a good movie.

Hope you liked this and I'll post again soon with another insight into the mind of Ciara. Thanks!


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