Try It, You’ll Like It: My Nontraditional Madeleines

 

Only a small amount of chocolate needed

Friends were dubious. Their first response was that substituting orange zest for lemon sounded fine, but they drew back in horror at the idea of chocolate. Nevertheless, she (I) persisted. What is cooking and baking without experiment or risk? This is, after all, a pretty small risk in the larger scheme of life. 

 

So here are the ingredients and amounts I used, which you would be wise to double, since I had cut the original traditional recipe in half before trying it the first time and just stuck with that for my variation. See previous post (here) for details of original attempt at madeleines. 

 

 

1 cup sifted flour 

½ cup fine sugar

salt

½ cup melted butter

2 eggs

½ tsp. vanilla

zest of one large orange

½ oz. baking chocolate

 

 

The small amount of chocolate doesn’t even have to be heated on the stove. When the butter is melted, just pull that little saucepan off the fire, add the chocolate, and stir. It will melt quickly.

 

You may be tempted to increase the amount of chocolate. Don’t. At least, that is, well, do what you want, but I recommend the small amount given here. You don’t want chocolate to overpower the orange flavor, nor do you really want a “chocolate cookie” result. Do you?

 

Sorry there is no photograph here of the results. I was making the chocolate-orange madeleines for a neighbor as a get-well gift and only kept four for us, which we ate immediately after dinner and before I could even think about grabbing my camera. We loved them. What more need I say?