Tag: vienna

citrus madeleinesThese French cakey cookies are completely classic, but I’d never made them before. When we went to Vienna last summer, I randomly found a real French madeleine mold for 5 Euro at a cool kitchen shop I was walking past. But it wasn’t until a particularly domestic evening a few weeks ago that I put it to use for the first time.

I used a recipe from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. It calls for cake flour, which is so hard to find, so I substituted pastry flour. Next time I will use a little less pastry flour, maybe 2 tablespoons per cup less (as figured out by reading this article). The cakes were a little grainy, but still soft and springy and delicious. An overall win for a first attempt.

However, I did run into one small problem. It was the number of cookies produced by this recipe. It said to use a 12-madeleine mold, which I did, but I missed the part where it said the recipe yields 24 cookies. It suggested reusing the same pan because they won’t cook well with 2 pans at the same time. I completely missed this part and thought the recipe just made 12 cookies. Hence, I overfilled the cups and made the most ginormous madeleines in the history of time. You can see in this photo how they have completely overflowed from the madeleine shape into mutant cookies. Adam said, “Oh, well!” and stuffed his smiling mouth with one of these giants.

Citrus Madeleines (from ATK Family Baking Book)
Makes 24 cookies, baked one 12-madeleine pan at a time

1 cup cake flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon (yep, that much) vanilla extract
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 tablespoon fresh lemon zest or orange zest

Read more on Recipe-A-Day Vol. II: Day Five, Citrus Madeleines…

I’ve been in a funk the past few days. August feels like one long Sunday night, taunting me with the promise of going back to school on September 1st. So I’ve been having a hard time getting jumpstarted to actually make the most of my remaining weeks of summer. And really, I have 4 weeks left. What am I complaining about? But I just couldn’t get excited about starting anything, I just felt like my time to relax was running out.

Read more on No More August Blues…

Today’s our last day in Vienna. Tomorrow we have breakfast and head to the airport. I was incredibly exhausted today, but we trekked out to a small town outside of Vienna called Hinterbruhl. We took a tram, a train, and a bus to get there. It has a system of underground caves and a large underground lake called Seegrotte. It was incredibly cool, even if I was falling asleep half the time.

Read more on Travelogue: Vienna, Day 4…

We kind of took it easy today, I honestly think all 5 of us are completely exhausted. We all went to Belvedere this morning to look at the gardens and walk through the big gallery at the top of the hill.

Read more on Travelogue: Vienna, Day 3…

We got up bright and early this morning and headed over to the Hofburg Palace Complex. We stopped at the Schmetterling Haus (Butterfly House) and took photos. It was a wonderful place.

Read more on Travelogue: Vienna, Day 2…

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