French Madeleines - Preparing the Molds

Karen Stiegler: Hi! I'm Karen Stiegler and today I am showing you how to make Traditional French Madelines. So first of all I want to talk for just a moment about the types of Madelines. The vanilla or butter flavor are the most popular and the most common, but you can also find them in flavors like orange and lemon and using ingredients like coconut, rose and orange water flour. They can also be flavored with different extracts and oils and spices, ground spices like cinnamon and ginger.

So there is a lot of different types, youll see recipes out there for. Now I want to talk about the pans. First of all today, I am going to be using this. This is a regular size metal madeline pan and this one happens to be non-stick. So they come in regular and non-stick. This pan is a mini-madeline pan. So you can make tiny little madelines, youll get more of the recipe of course. Then we also have this silicone or flexible madeline pan and this is also really handy but you want to make sure and put a cookie sheet or a cookie tray something underneath it, that can go onto the oven because as you can see, its clumsy. So when you fill it, you have to have support there. Today I am going to use this large madeline pan. I really prefer the metal pans that are non-stick because I feel that they give the most ease while producing the best madeline. So thats what I am going to use today. So in order to prepare the pans while our batter is chilling we have time to do that. We have time for oven to preheat. We want to first melt a little bit of butter. I mentioned in the beginning, a couple of tablespoons extra butter. So I just melted it on the stove or in the oven. So I don't want to use too much butter but I have a pasting brush here. And I am just going to gently brush each mold carefully. Now you want to make sure you coat every part inside the mold because anywhere that you don't get coated, it could stick. So you want to make sure, coat it all evenly. If you see later that you have missed a spot, you want to go back, dab a little butter with the brush or with your finger and then cover it again. Okay, so now we have brushed every mold with the butter. And what you want to do at this point is have a piece of parchment paper or wax paper either kind will work or you can have a tray, kind of baking sheet or baking tray and this is really going to help you for dusting these with flour.

So I have my flour here and I want to just dust a little bit. I had in the recipe about four tablespoons of extra flour, you don't need to sift this in advance. Okay, and then we are just going to kind of move our pans around so that we can get the flour dusted on all sides. And you can sort of bang here mold on the counter top like this to remove any excess. So I look like I did a pretty good job on this. So I don't think I need to go back and touch up any spaces. But what you can do then is this extra flour, don't throw it away, keep it and you can use it to spray butter your other pans. When this pan is done baking, youll have to prepare it again. So keep this on hand and you can use it for that.

Do not put this flour back into your main flour supply because it does theoretically have little bits of butter on it. So you can even keep it for another day when you are making a cake and you need to prepare the pan. One thing I would like to mention about this silicone or flexible pan, as I mentioned before you are going to have it on a tray or a cookie sheet. But one thing thats really convenient about these is you do not have to prepare the pans like the metal pan. You do not have to grease it with the butter and dust it with the flour. You can just put your batter in and bake and its ready to go and your madelines won't stick. So thats a great thing about having flexible pan. So that is how you preheat the oven and prepare the pans and next we are going to fill the molds.