In planning snack foods to make for my birthday, I found myself wanting lavender madelines. I looked up the idea to find many recipes, but many had other flavors like honey or lemon with just a hint of lavender. I wanted something stronger, and I also have a general distrust for online recipes, so I decided to just modify the regular lemon madeline recipe that I usually use. The only difference is that instead of the tablespoon of lemon zest the recipe calls for, I scraped out a vanilla bean into the tablespoon and filled the rest up with lavender that I cut with kitchen scissors to spread it out more.
I folded it into the batter as usual with the melted butter. I think perhaps this step would work better mixing the lavender and vanilla beforehand, because folding in the vanilla bean clumps was time-consuming and as a result the batter was likely a little overmixed. While this recipe usually fills up the whole pan, it didn’t this time, likely because there was less air.
The madelines came out a bit overbaked, and the lavender taste wasn’t as strong as I had hoped, though the vanilla was good.
I think in the future, I’ll add more lavender, and put some sort of floral sugar on top instead of just regular granulated sugar. Also bake for less time, obviously
It was a nice experiment overall, and I think with a few changes it could be really good!