English Madeleines

----------------
Now playing: Richard Harris - MacArthur Park
via FoxyTunes

......Someone left the cake out in the rain.....I don't think I can take it, it took so long to bake it........I'll never have that recipe again....Oh, Noooooooooo.....

Like the song says, we have been getting our fair share of rain and thunderstorms. Stuck inside away from the garden I made cakes, but they were safely inside away from the rain. I did have to brave the rain to harvest some snow peas, lettuce, chard and courgettes for tea.

Did you know the British have a version of the sponge-like entity called Madeleines? They do and what a treat they are! Here is my version of it:

English Madeleines

4 oz. butter
1/2 c. light muscavado sugar (brown sugar)
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract (or 1/2 a pod worth of beans)
2 eggs
2/3 c. self-rising flour (or make your own self-raising flour- the formula is: 1 c. flour 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda and a dash of salt)
1/2 c. raspberry jam - heated and strained of seeds
1 c. desiccated coconut
6 glace cherries- halved

Preheat oven to 350 deg.

Prepare 12 dariole tins with butter and flour.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add one egg and incorporate evenly. Add half of the flour and incorporate evenly. Repeat until ingredients used. Fill tins as shown, and bake for 20 minutes.

Don't fill the dariole tins too full with batter, or there will be a big mess. The oven magic will fill them to the top of the tin. I ran out of pastry bags for this, if you use one it will be much easier to fill and less messy. Today everything turned out fine.

When the cakes are done, cool them on a rack. Then, insert a skewer into the cake as shown. Roll the cake in the heated jam. Then, roll in coconut. Decorate with a glace cherry half.



A whole basketful!




....And then there was one!



The plate was given to me by my friend Cathy. It is a Spode plate, she knows how much of an Anglophile I am.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece. -Ludwig Erhard