De Buyer mini elastomoule madeleine mould review

Fancy trying your hand at baking madeleines? Sara Walker reviews the mini elastomoule madeleine mould by De Buyer. Read on to discover her verdict on the baking mould.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in France and eaten a lot of madeleines! These little sponge cakes are a bit like scones in the UK – everyone has their own version of the recipe, usually passed down through the family.

Despite lots of tips from French friends, though, I’ve never had much success in making them. They have a distinctive seashell shape, formed by the specially-shaped tin – and I’ve never been able to turn them out cleanly. After a few goes of digging them out with a knife and ending up with something only fit to make a trifle, I gave up.

Then I was asked to try this mini mould, which is made from soft silicone and (apparently) produces perfect results – would this be a match for my slightly rubbish madeleine-baking skills?

The pack came with its own recipe, using eggs, caster sugar, honey, orange zest, orange flower water, Gruau flour, butter and hazelnut oil. As I can never resist fiddling with a recipe, I modified it slightly!

Although madeleines are traditionally flavoured with orange flower water I’m not a huge fan, so I left that out and substituted lemon rind and juice. I also left out the honey and added a little more sugar. Gruau flour is French pastry flour (yes, I had to look it up too) and I didn’t have any (if they don’t sell it at Aldi, it’s not in the cupboard), so I substituted ordinary self raising flour.

I also cut the quantities down slightly – using a three-egg quantity of this sponge batter would have made three trays of 20 madeleines, I settled for two.

Having washed the mould, I made up the batter and spooned it into the moulds. On my first batch, I overfilled the moulds and got rather messy madeleines as they’d overflowed a bit, my second batch was much better but I only needed about 1/2 teaspoon of mixture per cake.

The instructions said not to put the mould on a baking tray but to place it directly on the oven shelf for even heat distribution. However, as I have an Aga the grill was too wide for me to do that (the individual cakes would have fallen through) so I did put it on a baking tray. This appeared not to cause any ill effects and made the mould much easier to handle.

These little cakes only took about six minutes to cook, so are perfect if you’re a bit pushed for time.

Now for the moment of truth! I left the tray to cool down a bit for about five minutes, then popped each individual cake out. They turned out like a dream, with the seashell shape intact, and I didn’t lose a single one. They only took a few minutes to cool properly, as well.

Once they were cool, I dipped half of them in melted milk chocolate, a quarter in melted white chocolate and left the remaining ones plain. These would be perfect to eat with coffee after a meal, or to put in a gift pack as a present instead of sweets. The main danger is that they’re so tiny I kept eating them off the tray when they were cooling, on the grounds that they were ‘too small to count’. Ahem.

I was impressed with this mini elastomoule madeleine mould, which was extremely easy to use and to clean. At £18 it’s not cheap, but it’s going to last for years. A great addition to your baking equipment.

The De Buyer mini elastomoule madeleine mould is available to purchase from Souschef.

All photography (c) 2019 Write Image for you Media

(Disclosure: The product was gifted, but all views and opinions are our own)

 

By Sara Walker.