These French cakey cookies are completely classic, but I’d never made them before. When we went to Vienna last summer, I randomly found a real French madeleine mold for 5 Euro at a cool kitchen shop I was walking past. But it wasn’t until a particularly domestic evening a few weeks ago that I put it to use for the first time.

I used a recipe from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. It calls for cake flour, which is so hard to find, so I substituted pastry flour. Next time I will use a little less pastry flour, maybe 2 tablespoons per cup less (as figured out by reading this article). The cakes were a little grainy, but still soft and springy and delicious. An overall win for a first attempt.

However, I did run into one small problem. It was the number of cookies produced by this recipe. It said to use a 12-madeleine mold, which I did, but I missed the part where it said the recipe yields 24 cookies. It suggested reusing the same pan because they won’t cook well with 2 pans at the same time. I completely missed this part and thought the recipe just made 12 cookies. Hence, I overfilled the cups and made the most ginormous madeleines in the history of time. You can see in this photo how they have completely overflowed from the madeleine shape into mutant cookies. Adam said, “Oh, well!” and stuffed his smiling mouth with one of these giants.

Citrus Madeleines (from ATK Family Baking Book)
Makes 24 cookies, baked one 12-madeleine pan at a time

1 cup cake flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon (yep, that much) vanilla extract
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 tablespoon fresh lemon zest or orange zest

Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 375. Grease the madeleine mold. Whisk the flour and salt together in a small bowl.

Beat the eggs and egg yolk together with an electric mixer on high speed until frothy, 3-5 minutes. Beat in the sugar, vanilla, and citrus zest until very thick, 3-5 minutes.

Gently fold in the flour mixture with a rubber spatula, followed by the melted butter.

Spoon half of the batter (this is the part I completely missed) into the prepped mold, filling it to the rim.

Bake until the cookies are golden and spring back when pressed lightly, about 10 minutes, rotating the mold halfway through baking.

Let the cookies cool in the mold for 10 minutes, then flip out onto a wire rack and cool completely before serving, about 1 hour. Cool and re-grease the mold and repeat with remaining batter.