The Sugar Bar

There are some things in life that must be enjoyed as a pair (like cookies and cream, bangers and mash, bread and butter, salt and vinegar, etc.). Madeleines fall into that category.

Not to be eaten without a cuppa coffee or tea, it would be almost criminal in my book to eat a madeleine just like that. Moreover, the best and freshest madeleines, according to French food expert Patricia Wells, are dry and have an almost dusty taste when eaten on its own. Its flavours, however, come to life when soaked in tea. I am not sure about how ‘dry’ madeleines are supposed to be but I have always enjoyed madeleines from a local boulangerie which were fairly moist. If they were at all mistaken to be dry (because I don’t think they ever quite were), they were just a tad difficult to swallow from being quite so dense.

Of course, some things are just best savoured in their place of origin. I had some lovely madeleines in Paris and I doubt my own come close but these were wonderfully buttery, fragrant and light. A real treat to the senses, especially with a fresh pot of tea livened up with a dash of milk. Indeed, the taste of a madeleine becomes vivid only when dipped in a cuppa tea, seducing you with its almost caramel/toffee-ish flavour. And is it wrong that I especially love squishing madeleine crumbs soaked in tea between the roof of my mouth and tongue?

These babies make such an awesome and cute tea treat. I’m looking forward to making a few more batches in the weeks to come as gifts for friends. And with the many variations of madeleines, in terms of flavour, out there, I’m truly eager to get going in the kitchen again.

I ain’t a perfectionist and wasn’t looking to recreate the perfect French Madeleine. Hence, I’ve chosen a recipe that includes baking powder. About the buerre noisette, otherwise known as nut or browned butter, I couldn’t be bothered. Don’t judge me, please. But hey, I got ‘em sexy humps didn’t I (see picture above)? My sis C, who wandered into the kitchen at time of baking, commented that it was like cultivating nipples in the oven. Yes it was cute to see them grow and peak, but also slightly weird to observe in the space of 10 minutes 10 portions of eggy batter become miniscule golden brown mountains.

I’ve used a recipe from the very talented Evan via her patisserie blog Bossacafez. I’ve added some tips in my directions below as well.

French Madeleines
(Recipe from Bossacafez, matcha powder omitted)
Ingredients

160g butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
120g cake flour
130g caster sugar
4.5g (about 1 heaped tbs) double acting baking powder
3 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste
icing sugar, for dusting (optional)

Preheat oven to 200d Celsius.

Grease madeleine mold with butter, dust with flour and tap out the excess. Freeze the madeleine mold before baking.

Sift together cake flour and baking powder. In a separate bowl, whisk together sugar and eggs until pale and fluffy. Add vanilla. Mix well.

Fold flour mixture into egg mixture followed by melted butter. Scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl with a rubber spatula to make sure that the butter is mixed in, leaving no oily residue on the sides.

Cover bowl with cling film and refrigerate it for at least 3 hours or overnight.

When ready, pour batter into mold using a pouring cup/jug. You may also use a spoon to fill the mold although a jug is a little less fussy. Fill the mold to fill 2/3 or 3/4 of the shell-shaped fill. Do not spread the batter out in the molds once poured in.

(I kept overfilling mine and this prevents your madeleines from growing a nice proud hump. Some bakers have recommended measuring the exact amount required to fill each shell-shaped mold perfectly but David Lebovitz on his blog here says it’s fine to eyeball it. Practice makes perfect I suppose!)

Bake in preheated oven for 10-13 mins, until puffed and golden around the edges.

After each batch, clean the pan with a kitchen towel then bake the rest. The pan should be fairly greased from the butter in the batter, requiring no second greasing of the pan.

Remove baked madeleines immediately onto a cooling rack. You can tilt them out onto it. I used a pair of chopsticks and gently picked them out of the mold. They slide out and off quite easily if you’ve greased and floured your pans well. They are quite soft and delicate when just out of the oven so I recommend using a cold plate or cooling rack with fine grids as they can leave marks on the shell shapes of your madeleines.

Once cool to handle, dust with icing sugar then eat to your hearts desire but don’t forget to dip (very ladylike, please no dunking they’re not bloody OREOs!) in a cup of tea. Whether you have milk in your tea or not, that shall be left to your own discretion.

You know, ninjas are like fairies. You don’t see them. But they exist, mostly in the shadows and the cracks between their underworld and ours. Somewhere between my bed and the wall that its pressed up against, a ninja lives in that shadowy crack. No idea why he/she’s spying on me but I’m happy tucking myself deep under the duvet, watching Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape in India and feeding this ninja of the dark (who’s tucked in somewhere as well under my bed probably) some of these truffles. My alter ego? A figment of my imagination? Or just plain excuse to make these black/white babies for me to eat? The latter seems most likely and I totally agree. I am a bit of nutter and I love chatting crap like this. Call me overworked, imaginative or plain crazy. I really don’t mind. I’ve got truffles.

The week has passed quite slow with horrible weather for most of it. Although today’s ridiculously sunny, bright and worm it feels like the world’s played a hoax upon us. But I’m not complaining. In fact, I totally rejoiced, ditched the essay that is begging to be written before I get chucked out of college, and ventured into the kitchen to make these.

I blame Catty. Oh my dear, in a good way. She made the scrummiest matcha & lemon truffles for Easter and was so generous to pass me some to taste. I was really stingy with myself, rationing it carefully and only caring to nibble it. Talk about waste of effort. They were gone by the next morning. I found myself mourning its bittersweet flavours so quick, I might’ve given myself heartburn (heartache?) pining away for it.

So of course I had to have more truffles about the house.

Now I’m wondering why I didn’t just begin the post that way. More respectable and, sane of course. Why on earth did I resort to pseudo mythmaking and one about a non-existence ninja-who-lives-in-the-shadows-of-my-bedroom? Not so sure. I think I munched on one too many squares of chocolate whilst waiting for these to set. The caffeine fried away my logic and the cocoa butter greased everything up in my brain, it turned to a squishy mess. No use to me at all.

I was inspired mostly by Japanese wagashi and more specifically, Minamoto Kitchoan’s Miyabiguruma. Of course, mine is nothing close and hardly as refined. Geez, it’s got Shreddies in there for crying out loud! But you can’t blame me for trying to recreate those flavours at home with what I had on hand. Not sure they looked very pretty but they were good. It really helps that I’m on a Shreddies craze as well. In my breakfast cereal, having it dry as a snack and now in chocolate truffles. I think I’m going slightly overboard. Who knows what I’ll be adding it to next. I fear to think it.

The concept to these truffles is similar to these Oreo truffles or Lemon Lime cream ones. Yes so they’re supposed to be pretty sweets. Pre-dipping in candy coating, however, my flatmate very eagerly exclaimed, ‘Oh you’re making meatballs!’. Uh oh. They really do look like meatballs, don’t they.

Types of anko:
(to make things easy, this is taken from Wikipedia)

Tsubuan (粒餡), whole red beans boiled with sugar but otherwise untreated
Tsubushian (潰し餡), where the beans are mashed after boiling
Koshian (漉し餡), which has been passed through a sieve to remove bean skins; the most common type
Sarashian (晒し餡), which has been dried and reconstituted with water

If you prefer to make your own anko, you can use this recipe here. I’ve never been too successful making my own because I’m too impatient to wait for it to soak overnight, and cook for hours til it’s soft enough to mash or pass through a sieve. So feel free to use canned anko. I’ve chosen a half mashed half whole bean anko from Meiji.

When it comes to truffles, I always use candy melts or coating chocolate, aka confectioner’s coating or bark. If you’re wondering whether this is chocolate, yes it is! But it’s chocolate for lazy bums like me. No tempering – only melt, mix, use, set. Its easier to control than regular chocolate, sets quick streak-free at room temperature, tastes great and doesn’t melt upon touching which I find happens a lot when using regular chocolate (which requires you sometimes to cool it in the fridge and then you get nasty sweating after when you take them out). Candy melts come in many colours. No fuss over what kind of colours to use (if you decide to use them) and whether oil, paste or powder or au naturel vegetable/fruit juice/dyes will affect it. I’ve used candy melts in Midnight Black and because I ran out of white melts, I’ve used Green & Blacks vanilla white chocolate.

I’m feeling a bit zen with the black and white colour combination. Time to whip out my teapot, sencha and ponder over something deep. Who knows, my shadow ninja might decide to join me for a cuppa.

Makes about 12-15 eyeball-sized truffles. (I would’ve said ping pong-sized but aren’t eyeballs a little smaller and heck, sounds more fun. No?)

Chestnut & Adzuki Bean Black/White Chocolate Truffles
Ingredients

1 can/210g anko (adzuki bean paste)
10-12 small cooked chestnuts, depending on how many you end up making
about 1/2 cup Shreddies, finely crushed
about 1/2 cup black chocolate candy melts
about 1/2 cup white chocolate candy melts
black sesame seeds, for garnish (optional)
white sesame seeds, for garnish (optional)

There isn’t really a recipe for this is there? It’s just banging ingredients together.

In a bowl, mash together crushed Shreddies and enough anko to get a cement-like consistency. You don’t want it too dry or it won’t hold together. But you need it wet enough to be able to seal itself around the chestnut. Play around with it until you feel confident of it holding up.

Take a chestnut and about 1/2 to 1 tbs of crushed Shreddies and anko mixture, press into it and start to carefully seal the chestnut into it. Gently press to smoothen out the surface like you would a rice ball, then lightly roll between palms to form balls. If the surface starts to gloss and smoothen itself out, that’s perfect. Repeat for the other chestnuts. Place on a plate covered with grease-proof parchment. Place in refrigerator to let the chestnut balls set a bit for about 3-4 minutes.

In small bowls, melt candy coating separately, following the directions written on the bag (it will differ slightly depending on their make but will normally require a 1 minute melt-time in microwave; mix; 10 second blasts and mixing until the coating is completely melted and smooth).

Drop chestnut balls in candy coating, coat and drop onto flat surface lined with grease-proof parchment. Garnish with a tiny sprinkling of sesame seeds of the opposite colour. Allow to set for about 2 minutes or so. Done.

Two Easters ago, I baked a feast. I went so crazy there were cakes, muffins and cookies everywhere: on the tabletops, in the bedroom, in the freezer, in the fridge. It was gloriously nightmarish. A thoroughly obsessively psychotically sick affair.

Last Easter, I believe things were a little more toned down. Moderation was key.

This year, we went for a nice balance of things. Don’t they say good things come in pairs? Two’s a nice number. Well-rounded and more acceptable. In that case, this Easter, we’ve got cookies and cakes. No more than that. No more, no less. I thought we were quite clever.

On Tuesday, we had a nice little wander through the Oxford Covered Market. There’s a cake shop in there which I’ll blog a little later on about. Truly inspiring cakes and sugarcraft. And they make personalized easter eggs made to order too! In fact, H and I had our Easter eggs from there last year. They were yum. And almost too pretty to eat. It’s shops like that that make you feel like you’ve gotta bake. You leave wanting to make something of your very own, to get creative and start challenging yourself in the kitchen. I don’t suppose we really did challenge ourselves but we sure had good fun in the kitchen that day.

Little fairy cakes topped with dolly mixture (we’ve so gotta love these sweets…so mildly flavoured and pretty to look at) for Easter cakes and a twist on the usual oatmeal raisin cookie which gives you something to talk about as well if you’ve got guests coming round for tea. I haven’t posted a recipe for the Fairy Cakes as H actually remembers this basic recipe by heart. It’s simply margarine, vanilla, flour, eggs, sugar all skillfully beaten by hand then baked at 175d Celsius until ready. Cooled, then frosted with a mix of icing sugar and water. Voila. Top them with sweets or decoration of choice. Cute as a button.

When it comes to eating cookies, dunking in a glass of cold milk is second nature. Or sometimes just eating it sans milk is pretty okay too. Dunking in hot coffee or tea seems unthinkable to me. I’ve seen my mum do it and it leaves rings of buttery-surfaced coffee in the cup. I’ve seen my mates do it and it just all looks a little drippy, a little messy. This time I tried it with this oatmeal cookie and I have a strange feeling my cookie-eating ways have been forever altered. Or at least, when it comes to oatmeal cookies. You’ve gotta dunk them in something warm. Leave the cold milk for the chocolate chip cousin. Oatmeal cookies have so gotta be dipped in a hot coffee or tea. A momentary experience of sweet bliss, as comforting as a spoonful of warm honey-laced porridge. So good.

Happy Easter everyone! Hoping the Easter bunny sends out much sugary love to all. Will post up some of my little Oxford visit here soon.

Oatmeal Cherry & Walnut Cookies
Ingredients

115g unsalted butter, softened
1 cup plain flour, sifted
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup/225g dark brown sugar
1 large egg
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
3/4 cup glace cherries, chopped
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 175d Celsius.

Cream butter and sugar til light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, then beat.

In another bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and baking soda, salt, ginger and cinnamon. Add oats to this and mix. Add to wet mixture of creamed butter and sugar. Mix until it is just incorporated.

Fold in cherries and walnuts. Do not overmix.

Form into 1-2 tbs balls or simply drop onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 15-18mins or until just golden brown.

Cooking it for longer gets these cookies a darker shade and they turn into nice crunchy cookies when kept. Cooking for 15mins leaves it nice and chewy in the middle so cook according to your preference. Leave to cool on sheets for a minute before transferring to wire rack to cool completely.