I have been trying recipes from the new cookbook I got for Christmas, Baking:From My Home to Yours * and I decided I was at a point in my life where I was ready to attempt Madeleine’s.  Spoiler alert, they were amazing.

I was a little intimidated by the whole thing, as they require a special pan, they get stale quickly, and they have such a storied history. I decided the dumbest thing to worry about was a pastry getting stale. I ordered the pan with some of my generous Amazon gift card money that I received for Christmas and my birthday and I followed the recipe in the book.

Marcel Proust dipped a Madeleine in tea and experienced a flood of childhood memories, writing about them in Remembrance of Things Past.  The cookbook explains the story well and I read it to the kids.  I also read the entry on wikipedia, where they reference a Pet Shop Boys song with the lyrics:

“Over and over again
I keep tasting that sweet madeleine
looking back at my life now and then
asking: if not later then when?”

That very day as we waited for the madeleine pan to arrive, the boys noticed this lyric from the song Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots:

“Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young”

Jack said, “I can’t wait to see what memories I have when I eat my madeleine.”  Luke laughed, but I thought it was so sweet.  We had to explain that the madeleine brings back memories of other times you have eaten madeleines.

The madeleines were so good.  My only problem was that the recipe seems to really make 13 or 14 not 12 so some of the madeleines spilled over. I might have to just cook a couple extra blobs in a separate pan next time.  The boys want to have Madeleine Mondays now, but so far that hasn’t become a habit.  I do need to make a bunch more to justify the pan, but on the bright side, it barely takes up any space.

But I was happy to make some new memories with a delicious pastry.

* I started linking to indiebound.org for book purchases if you are interested.  I will receive a portion of any sale from these links.