Tuesdays with Dorie: Chocolate Fluff-filled Madeleines

      Thanks to Margot, from Effort to Deliciousness, for her pick of Chocolate Fluff-filled Madeleines, found on pages 170-171 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours cookbook.  You can find the recipe here.  Margot makes terrific toffee, just ask Matt, she sent us some with her recipe and I have been answering requests for toffee from Matt ever since.  He even calls it Margot's Toffee (don't tell David Lebovitz that, however).   

      Before I begin, let me just say that I am a Madeleine baker.  I have tried various recipes with varying results.  I have tried various Madeleine pans with varying results.  I have a recipe that I have found that works well, tastes delicious with that melt-in-your-mouth quality that I associate with a drop-dead great Madeleine recipe, and I am not one to toy around with A Good Thing. 

      That said, my TWD baking pals on Twitter and I embarked on the journey that was this recipe when we all woke up with the same inclination to bake Madeleines that day.  All of us had varying degrees of success.  I think my efforts were the worst of the bunch actually, something that does not set well with me as I always think of myself as a person who can make great Madeleines on a moment's notice.
      I love Dorie's recipes, I do.  Week after week, I am the one who always bakes everything as written figuring Dorie knows way more than I do and I am here to learn from her.  That said, the very first recipe that I baked when I joined the TWD group was Dorie's for Madeleines.  And it was good, it was very fussy in preparation compared to my It's A Good Thing recipe, and it didn't taste quite as good as It's A Good Thing recipe, but I was happy to have made them. 

      Enter this week's chocolate Madeleine recipe.  Already, if you know me at all, it has one strike against it because it is chocolate and I am just not a fan.  I like my Madeleines very traditional.  Looking beyond that, I think the greatest "fail" I had with this recipe is that my butter separated and sank to the bottom of the bowl when it was chilling in the refrigerator.  I did not realize this when I was scooping the batter into the Mad Pans and when I got near the bottom I thought, "Uh, oh, what's THIS?" I knew I was probably in trouble as all the congealed butter on the bottom was definitely not in the Madeleine batter in the pan already. 

      It was not going well, so I just chopped up the butter, poked it into the batter in the pans and popped it into the oven anyway.  "Why would you do that?" you ask.  Because I have guys over here that will eat most anything chocolate so I figured it wouldn't be a total loss even if I had to make them again with a slight variation to Dorie's recipe (which I try never to do), i.e. no chilling of the batter, just straight into the oven. 

      Apparently they tasted fine, although they did have large holes in the cookie (see above photos), they tasted okay and even better with the fluff inside and chocolate icing outside. 

      Will I make them again?  Yes, I might.  Just to see how it works with going straight from mixing the batter in the bowl to the pans and then into the oven without the chilling.  I am very eager to see how everyone else did with this recipe because I am fairly certain, that knowing Dorie's attention to detail, the whole congealed butter drama was something that I didn't do correctly.  Now, if I could just figure out what that was, I could correct it.  

      Next week:  Betsy from A Cup of Sweetness has chosen Lemon Poppyseed Muffins, found on page 10. TWD blogroll found here.