When life gives you sugar, make madeleines!

We were recently on holiday in France and one of the kids pointed out that in literally every cafe, sachets of sugar arrived perched on the saucer of your coffee. This of course led to a stream of questions about whether all French people take 2 sugars with their coffee, why aren’t they served in a bowl like in the UK, and do they go straight in the bin if you don’t use them? There was even a suggestion made that we shouldn’t stop in cafes for coffee, to prevent the wastage of said sugar…. (and anyone who knows me, knows that I love my coffee and that idea would just not wash!)

So in a bid to preserve both my daily caffeine fix and the blessed sugar sachets, we set the kids a challenge…. To collect the coffee cup sugar sachets throughout the week, bring them home to the UK and see if we would end up with enough to make a cake! Luckily for us they thought that this was a crazy and fun idea which led to much enjoyment of the holiday cafe culture. The 7 year old even resorted to ordering the odd hot chocolate to boost the collection! We enjoyed counting the sachets, speculating about their weight and noticing the differences in branding used by each cafe – definitely tenuously educational as well….

Anyway, when we arrived home we were keen to see how much sugar we had accumulated and were impressed to find it was a whopping 168g – definitely enough to make a tasty treat! After much consideration the children decided to make madeleines in honour of the French heritage of the sugar. The recipe we used was from a lovely little recipe book called We Love Madeleines. It was very easy for the 7 & 4 year old to weigh and mix themselves. The hardest part was having the patience to leave the mixture in the fridge overnight, but it was worth it as resting the mixture is recommended to create the nice domes in the cakes.

You do need a special madeleine tray to bake these cakes in, as it is scalloped to give them their shell like appearance. (We had one already, but you can pick one up quite cheaply). After 10 mins in the oven they were done perfectly and the wait was over. We had enough sugar from our holiday challenge to make 24 madeleines with a little bit left over. Lots of giggles and silly memories too – I have a feeling this challenge may become a staple of future family holidays!

Have you done any silly projects like this with your kids? Why don’t you join us in the chat group and share your ideas too!