Treat of the Week: Sumptuous Spice Madeleines

The madeleine is a small sponge cake which originated in the Loraine region of France. These plump, delectable cakes are famous for their distinctive shell-like shape which comes from being baked in a pan with shell-shaped depressions.


Two different stories surround the naming of the madeleine. Some believe that they were named for Madeleine Paulmier, a Nineteenth Century pastry chef. Others think that Paulmier was a cook in the Eighteenth Century who worked for the father-in-law of King Louis XV of France who named the wee cakes in her honor. Regardless of their origin, these wonderful cakes often represent France in bakeries around the world.

Instead of the typical sponge cake madeleines, my mother has created a wonderful variation with spice-cake madeleines. With a mellow spice flavor and a dusting of powdered sugar, they are the perfect accompaniment to a rich pudding, such as the butterscotch pudding pictured here, or on their own. Not only are they delicious, they’re inspirational.

Celebrated author Marcel Proust wrote of madeleines in Remembrance of the Things Past. Proust rhapsodized about tea and madeleines as symbols of the persistence of beautiful memories.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?