Dear Mom: They Are Good
My mom, Starr¹, gave me a mission: find a commercial brand of madeleine called “Donsuemor” and report back.
I wandered the aisles of Whole Foods for several minutes before a wayward glance toward the cafe landed on the brown plastic wrapper of the Donsuemor madelines, at which point I began laughing. Turns out I’ve seen them before and remember seeing them before because their motto is “The One You Remember”.
I have to admit I wasn’t expecting much; in the package, the cookies felt hard and dense, quite unlike the madeleines I make at home. In fact, I rather reluctantly called her back to tell her I found them. She sounded so excited when she commanded me to search them out! I put it off by telling her I wanted to eat them with my tea later, and thus procrastination achieved.
I fired up the kettle and set about making a cup of tea in my favorite Fire King teacup in an attempt to influence my tastebuds. I grimly sat down to my doomed morning cuppa and with great weariness, dipped the madeleine into my tea.
So, of course it was totally tasty.
Donsuemor madeleines are dense, yes, but they have a clean, rich, poundcakey flavor that I gobbled down before realizing I should have taken another photo. Too late, down the piehole. And considering how rarely I feel like baking up a batch of 40+ madeleines — half of which go stale before I can eat them all — I’ll gladly accept ‘dense’ as being the worst adjective I can think of.
¹In light of this post being about tea and cookies and my mother, I didn’t drop a single f-bomb!
June 2nd, 2009 | Obsessed
MY FAVOURITE TEA CUP IS ALSO A FIREKING! i’ve had two. the first one was white, and while i was at work one day i slid it carelessly across the counter and it smashed to the floor. I’m told that following the crash there was a deafening NOOOOOOO!!! I don’t remember that though because i blacked out. i had to go home early that day and EVERYONE UNDERSTOOD. Then for chanukah that year Leesa found and bought me a Jadite one. i am very careful with this one.
i set the broken shards of my first one into a shadowbox so it and the lesson learned would never be forgotten.
Also, the next time you make madeleines just go ahead and box up the half that will likely go stale immediately and send them to me.
Aaron, that’s absolutely chilling about your crashing tea cup and your subsequent reaction. There was a PBS special on the subject of Einey’s Theory of Relativity. In it, Steven Hawking did this crazy demo explaining a tenant of Relativity and The Big Bang by … SLIDING A FRELLING TEA CUP OFF THE SIDE OF A TABLE!
According to Hawking’s explanation, the dire effects of a crashing tea cup would explain your blackout.
… something to do with Worm-holes and Universes colliding and a bunch of stuff I didn’t comprehend … ’cause I don’t drink tea.
Fire King knows how to make a teacup, that is for damn sure. Wait, is it one word? I think it might supposed to be hyphenated: Fire-King. Well, whatever: I’m a fan of the “turquoise blue” myself, as seen in my teacup photo, but now of course all that stuff is way too expensive. Sad. I love that teacup up there, so simple and clean-lined. And the perfect color of milky-blue. Sigh. I have two I bought at an antique store in Ohio for something like $6 each – now the only turquoise cup and saucer online I can find is like $30.
Check this out!!! I’m considering bidding on it. It’s fucking rad.
Wait a damn minute! Why are there so many good deals right now? Shit, maybe I should bid on these and bring my set up to four. Damn it! I can’t afford this.
How did your mom hear about Donsuemor Madeleines?
You know, I think she said she read about them in a magazine, which means I’m going to guess Cook’s Illustrated?
thank you so much for your selfless research daughter, I knew I could count on you. There was a small article in Fine Cooking this month in the Great Finds section about a husband and wife team started selling these from the back of their Volkswagen bus in 1976. I wish I could have tasted those, I bet they were even better. I’ll check out Bayview and see if they have them.