sorry about the hiatus

I haven't blogged in what feels like forever, but I just worked 9 days in a row so I feel like that is an acceptable excuse...hopefully you can all forgive me. I attempted and failed at vegan madeleines normally people don't post their failures on the internet, but I had several lessons I learned and wanted to share and I feel like I know where I went wrong. I'm going to try again, but I ran out of flour, rookie mistake. I'm going to share my basic recipe and the changes I plan to make and hopefully I'll have some perfect madeleines that even the most pretentious frenchmen would accept. I used these three websites as a guide, not vegan, vegan goddess, and vegan stranger.

1 1/4 cup sifted flour
2 1/2 tablespoons ground flaxseed
1/4 cup hot water
2 tablespoons plain soy yogurt
1 cup sugar
6 tbs earth balance
2 teaspoons lemon zest
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons almond milk

The first step is to brown the butter, browned butter lends a really pleasant nutty taste to anything you bake and the browned earth balance makes a big difference in the final color of these little guys so it's really worth the extra work. Place your butter into a small pan and turn the burner on low give it a few miniutes without stirring to melt completely, once it's all the way melted you can stir if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't make any differencee in the final product. Let your butter cook for about 15 minutes stirring occassioanally, you want to achieve a nice brown color, not burnt butter so watch it closely. This is what the halfway point looks like,

about 8 minutes after you see this it's done. Place a paper towel over a bowl large enough to hold the butter and pour the butter onto it, this seperates the solids that developed during browning, gently lift the paper towel and keep as many of the solids as you can on it, if you have a mesh sieve this process would be much easier. Set the butter aside to cool to room temperature.













Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, grease and flour your madeline pan grease it lightly and flour it generously then tap the excess of, everything I read says that a well floured pan helps with well defined ridges. Mix the flax seed and the hot water then add to the bowl of a stand mixer, add the yogurt and mix on high for about 4 minutes. This was one of my really exciting successes, if you bake a lot you know that when using eggs you often beat them to the "ribbon" stage and this has the effect of shaping your baked goods, well this yogurt flax mixture formed ribbons! I was ecstatic, my boyfriend didn't understand my joy but I'm sure you all will!

See that shiny ribbon of goop?! There are not any eggs in there!! While the mixer is running on medium speed everything except the flour and butter. Once everything is combined turn off your mixer and sift the flour right on top, using a rubber spatula fold the flour in, this will not be an easy task the batter will be pretty thick and lumpy but thats ok, once it is all incorporated add the butter and gently fold it in with your spatula. This took me a while, probably because 6 tbs is way too much butter for this recipe, but it was a learning experience! Once everything is mixed together and smooth fill your molds 3/4 of the way full, slide them into the oven and bake for 7 minutes and 350 then reduce the heat in your oven to 250 and bake another 8 minutes then turn your oven off and let them sit in there for 20 minutes, I know this seems ridiculous but it works! So my final result was more like lemon pound cake, too dense, too buttery, too sweet, and not very defined ridges, but they were tasty! So for my next try I'm going to cut the flour, butter, and sugar (yay! healthier!) and increase the water I mix with the flax, I'll let you all know how it goes!