Karen Stiegler: Hi! I'm Karen Stiegler and today I am showing you how to make to Traditional French Madelines. So now we are going to fill the molds or the pans. So we have our pan totally prepared with the melted butter and the flour dusted on it, so we know it won't stick and we have our batter that has been chilling for 10 to 15 minutes. You don't want to leave it too long but it needs to get a little bit thicker. So you can place it in the molds. So you can see its thickened up a little bit. Now, first I am going to tell you about filling the molds with pastry bag and this is a 12-14 inch pastry bag and I have a tip here, a large round tip, its tip 1 A happens to be, but it doesnt have to be that particular tip. So you want to put the tip into your pastry bag and then you want to twist and push down and this will just help prevent the batter from going down before you are ready to pipe it. So we want to use a nice, tall cup like this any old cup will work. Put the pastry bag inside, and then cuff it over. And this will just keep a clean area in the top and will help you work cleaner, its a good idea and its easier to fill it in the cup this way. So now we are going to put the batter inside the pastry bag and its also easy to use this cup because you can sort of scrap the batter into the bag. Now we only want to fill the bag about half full. We don't want to overfill the bag. This is really important because first of all, if you overfill the bag, it will leak out the top and be really messy.

And second of all, we want to be able to squeeze the bag without it being too hard. So thats another reason we want to have it only half full. So once we fill the bag, we can roll the cup back up. We have a nice clean cup and take it out. And then we can undo this tip and squeeze, squeeze the batter down towards the tip. Now I want to talk to you a little bit about holding the bag. You want to twist the top of the bag and hold it between your thumb and your first finger.

You want to squeeze with this palm of your hand, okay. Thats pretty important. You don't want to squeeze with your fingers. You want to squeeze with your palm and you are twisting it to force the batter down into the tip and prevent the batter from coming out the top of the bag. So because I untwisted it, its already starting to come out. So well go ahead and pipe. So we want to pipe just the mound of dough into each mold and it goes really quickly with this pastry bag. Alright, so I have all my molds filled. Now I can just go back here and where I put my finger or a towel or whatever to make sure that its clean. Let me just tell you one other thing is, you can use a disposable pastry bag and in this case you wouldnt need the tip, you wouldnt need the round tip that we put in. You will just open it up, put it in your cup and cup it over like we did before. Fill it once again, only half full and then you could take it out and the batter will not come out until you cut off the tip with the pair of scissors. So thats kind of a convenient thing. When you are ready to go, you clip off the tip and then you pipe it into the molds. The other thing you can do is you can use a spoon to just spoon a small amount of batter and put it into the molds. But its a little messier. If you want to know more about piping and using a pastry bag, a really good idea is to take a cake decorating course and may be you have already done a little bit of cake decorating even just a basic cake decorating course. Well give you the skills to do work with the pastry bag really well. So thats one thing, but you don't have to use a pastry bag. You don't have to have it. You can spoon it in and your molds are ready to go. So next we are going to bake the madeline.