Those are Santa madeleines. This is a fun Christmas treat to prepare with children and adults. My older daughter – who is 11 years old – ha that idea for her classmates. The teacher had placed a Christmas sock at the back of each student’s chair. I think those Santas did not stay long in the socks!
It is fun to make those Santa madeleines, not just for the children, I found that pretty cool too!
Before you start, it may be a good idea to wear aprons.
The concept of the Santa madeleine
Make a bunch of madeleines. You will need the special madeleine prints for this. The recipe I use is HERE. If you aren’t a fan of the lemon taste, don’t put any, you can put a dash of good quality vanilla extract.
You will need food colouring of a rich red colour from your supermarket.
Once the madeleines have cooled down, you can start the icing and complete your Santa madeleines! Note that the icing will need a few hours to dry fully, overnight is better.
You will need to make a white icing, a red icing and have found some little eyes bits (from the shops) for the eyes. If you want to add a pompon-like item, you can find little sugar stars for example. you will find those in the baking section of the shops.
Making and applying the icing
To prepare the icing, you need:
one lemon or two squeezed lemons
2-3 cups of icing sugar sifted (to avoid any lumps)
the red food colouring
For the white icing, place a cup of the sifted icing sugar in a bowl, add about 1/2 lemon juice. Just add a little at the time and start mixing. You basically want something quite pasty, a bit like Nutella when at room temperature (or maybe a tiny bit more fluid). If you went too far, i.e. your icing is too liquid, add more sugar!
For the red, start with the red food colouring and then add the lemon juice. Aim for the same consistency a the white. Be mindful to not mix the utensils you are using.
To apply the icing on your Santa madeleines
When there are kids involved, I am all for simple tools. We used toothpicks to draw the hat border and small spoons for the beard and hat.
To attach the eyes on your Santa madeleine, put a little white icing underneath each eye and “glue” them to the madeleine.
To clean your kitchen bench
The red icing is messy (the white as well but it cleans without a trace). Use baking soda and a bit of water to form a paste and rub your kitchen bench. it should come off very well!
Going to the beach or to a park? Going for a little bush wonder? These pages point you out to simple recipes for outdoors afternoons. Add this to fruits and/or crudity and you are ready to go! Great little snack for kids always on the move!
To go straight to the new recipe of the week, go to “le cake” or simply HERE. I did it today for the local children music performance and manage to get a good photo before going (the cake was still hot when e arrived there). Use those at other time for lunch box or get-together, garanteed to go!
The madeleines
This one if probably my favourite for excursion: no cutting required, easy to handle, small size and quite popular. The recipe for the basic version is HERE, you can vary and incorporate variations, one of them is with strawberries and rosemary (recipe HERE).
The log cake called “le cake”
I promised this recipe a while ago. For me, it is childhood memories of delicious afternoon snacks. Le cake (sic in French) is a log cake , a simple butter cake flavoured with lemon or sultanas or candied fruits. This is the new recipe of the week! Check the recipe HERE.
The palets bretons
Palets bretons are a type of french biscuits. You need to start the recipe the day before, even better, as they keep for a couple weeks, make them in batch dring the holidays season and use as required! Again, pretty simple to make! Recipe HERE.
Chocolate chip cookies
Another favourite in our family, no need to look at another recipe. I have posted on them recently. Look HERE.
These strawberry and rosemary madeleines go really well with some fruit desserts which ask for a little cake or biscuit on the side.
I love madeleines, they are cute, crusty, light. They go with so many things and can be made rapidly (very rapidly) and for many reasons. As a child, it is one of the first cake recipes we made again and again, the other two ones being the yoghurt cake and the “reine de Saba” (or Sheba’s Cake), a light chocolate cake.
Strawberry and rosemary madeleines
The recipe is pretty close to the recipe for the plain madeleines, with the addition of the strawberries and rosemary.
Ingredients
These proportions made about 40 strawberry and rosemary madeleines.
120 g butter
2 tbs rosemarry (very finely chopped)
1.5 cups of strawberry
250 g of plain flour
150 g white sugar
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
Method
Melt the butter in a small saucepan on low heat with the chopped rosemary. Before it turns colour, emove from heat and let infuse and cooling.
Use a food processor to mix the eggs and sugar together until fluffy (alternatively use a whisk).
Remove the leaves of the strawberry and puree in a blender. Mix with the egg and sugar.
Add the flour and baking powder
Add the butter (keep the rosemarry) slowly
Put a tablespoon of the mix in each madeleine print and bake for 10-15 minutes on oven 17o°C
Cool on a rack, make sure they do not touch when cooling.
Madeleines are very versatile biscuits. First, they taste great. Then they are kind of cute. The other advantage is that they take no time to make and that you generally will ave the ingredients at home!
Madeleines can be served on their own for the afternoon snack, or with coffee or tea. I love them, and I am not the only one (tested for you!). They are also perfect for children who come back again and again for a spare one!
Has autumn finally arrived in Sydney? At our place, the deciduous trees are dropping their leaves and the evenings and early morning are rather fresh. I already hinted at it last week with my post on chestnuts. Today is about autumn cooking, illustrated by a few dishes made at home in the last week or so.
On another matter, the subscription link is back running, check the side of the blog on a laptop or the bottom of the page on a mobile phone.
Let’s start by a breakfast treat…
I decided to give another do to the croissants dough recipe and make viennoiseries a bit different to croissants and pains au chocolat. Because the batches are quite big, I freeze the pieces directly after shaping them on a tray (then pack away). The night before I want them, I put them out of the freezer on a baking sheet and let them unfreeze and rise. My problem was that I had very inconsistent risings and end results, but this time I think I worked it out! The best is that the kids and I made that together, or rather they laid the custard, sultanas, rolled the dough in a log, wrapped it, I only did the cutting of the log.
Pains aux raisins
And you know what? Today is not all about sweet dishes!
The below was a quick cook, 60 minutes to dinner, a bit like a Masterchef challenge. I am quite ahppy with the end result!
I prepared a mushroom and fresh salmon tart (pastry included) served with a roasted pumpkin, beans and baby spinach salad. And dessert with that? This is where a 7 y.o. child comes handy, this was a rapid apple cake, a recipe known in my family as a (hold on!) “Rombidi Rondidi Radada) but more generally in the wider northern part of France countryside as a 5,4,3,2,1 . For the salmon tart and salad, I had my 4 y.o. as kitchen hand (cutting ends of the beans), mixing, placing the mushrooms and salmon in the tart.
Fresh Salmon TartMixed green and roasted pumpkin salad
Another night, another dish, a soup!
Chestnut Soup
Doing a chestnut soup had been in my mind for a while, but I did not want to add cream and make it too heavy. I quickly browsed recipes, again I did not feel like adding pumpkin or many vegetables. I was after something where chestnut was the hero with a little something to ensure balance in flavours.
Now, chestnuts are nutritious, regardless what you do with them. A bowl of that soup can make your dinner! In south-eastern France and in Corsica, where they grow plentiful on rocky slopes, they helped the populations go through hard times.
This chestnut soup recipe contains one small onion, one parsnip, one potato (probably not that necessary), two pears and plenty chestnuts! And the peeling of the chestnuts did not take so much time and was easy (place the incised chestnuts in cold water and brink to the boil!).
Quails season is also now, or at least the natural hunting season
When I was a child, my grandfather would install nets in trees and bushes to catch quails in autumn. I have never been with him, I remember the stories and numerous return home empty handed! This week, I got a tray of quails from Vic Meats at the Sydney Fish Market (I went there to get some mussels), it was a little treat. Since I was again cooking at the last minute, I did not spend too much time in books or websites looking at recipes. I do not cook quails very often. For those I mixed together some turmeric, paprika, a little sumac, some ground vanilla beans, made a paste by adding olive oil and rubbed the mix around the birds, Inside I placed some fresh garden herbs and crushed garlic. The rest is easy: brown the quails on both sides, then add one cut of dry white wine, salt, about one cup of red-currents, 2 large shallots sliced, salt and pepper. I had to balance the acidity by adding one teaspoon of sugar. Just before serving I rounded the sauce with a piece of butter. I served them with grilled potatoes and parboiled broccoli.
Quails in red-current sauce
Was it a good dish, yes definitely, but it is probably difficult to have a disaster with quails. My younger one refused to eat a little bird, she asked to check the image online, no way she was going to eat it (she tried on her own will) !
A few autumn colour desserts…
A chocolate mousse is a crowd pleaser, always! It takes ten minutes to prepare, it needs to be done a few hours ahead of the meal (4 minimum, 6 or more is best). It contains only eggs and cooking chocolate: no sugar, no cream. As my children would say :”got it?”….the recipe is HERE.
Chocolate mousse
This other dessert is for all seasons really but the colours work so well with autumn! This lemon and lime tart is a recipe from Julie Goodwin, an early contestant and winner of the Australian Masterchef. The recipe is available on Julie’s website or on my blog HERE. The edges of my crust got a bit hot (but not burnt). I would advise the blind cooking by picking holes with a fork instead of using blind baking stones may be the solution to avoid the issue.
Those are Santa madeleines. This is a fun Christmas treat to prepare with children and adults. My older daughter – who is 11 years old – ha that idea for her classmates. The teacher had placed a Christmas sock at the back of each student’s chair. I think those Santas did not stay long in the socks!
