Tea Infused Madeleines

The second Tuesdays with Dorie recipe for this week was picked by Nicole of Bakeologie. She chose Earl Grey Madeleines. We’ve made a couple of madeleines for Tuesdays with Dorie, but these caught my attention. You take tea leaves and infuse the butter for a short while and then strain the butter and use that for the cookies. What an interesting idea! You can get the complete recipe for these madeleines on Nicole’s blog and take a look at all the links for this week’s recipe on the Tuesdays with Dorie site.

I don’t really like floral teas like Earl Grey, so I decided to use a different type of tea. We’re recently visited a neat tea shop near the Pike Place Market and I had purchased some Cranberry Orange Rooibos tea. I drink a lot of Rooibos tea since it is caffeine free and has a good flavor. I thought cranberry orange would be good for the holiday season. When I infused the butter with the tea leaves, the butter turned a light shade of pink. I had hoped that the madeleines would have a slight pink tinge, but they didn’t.

I used my new hand mixer to make these and it worked great! I used to think that madeleines were difficult, but I don’t think that at all now. These came out of the pan very cleanly and they just looked beautiful. I don’t think that the tea flavor is very strong, but they have a slight aroma and flavor of the tea. I imagine that the Earl Grey might be more pronounced, but I liked these quite a bit. Madeleines are my boss’s favorite cookies, so I took some to her and she (and her husband) liked them a lot.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 169