Madeleines and memories

On Thursday night, after dinner, I suddenly had an overwhelming craving for cake. Not just any cake, nor just anything sweet - it had to be a light, vanilla-scented sponge, full of subtle, clean flavours. I was seriously tempted to bake, but at gone 9pm, I decided I would be asleep before the cake was cool enough to eat, and had a glass of Cointreau instead. Not a bad cake substitute, actually. 

But by Friday morning the craving had crystallised. I wanted the almost-greasy stickiness of madeleines. A lunch hour mission to Lakeland provided me with a madeleine tin (and much more besides thanks to a 3 for 2 on bakeware) and, as soon as I got home from work, I started. 

At first I tried this recipe, as it looked by far the simplest, and I whisked the eggs by hand - quite an undertaking. Now, talking about madeleines and memories is now an unbearable cliché, and as I've never even read Proust, it's one I have no right to invoke. But whisking? That's a different story. And as I stood there, bowl in the crook of one arm, balloon whisk whizzing in the other hand, I remembered Mrs Harris standing over me when I was eight, teaching me how to mix a cake batter. 

My mum is a brilliant cook, but hates baking, and both my grandmothers lived a long way away and died before I was 12. So Mrs Harris - a short, stout, perfectly coiffed and rather glam 50-or-60-something who looked after my brother and me when my mum was at work in the school holidays, and who my father always said looked a little like Mrs Tiggy- winkle, stepped in. 

We were old enough not to need babysitters, and Mrs Harris didn't need the money, but as she once told me, she looked after other people's children out of love. She taught my brother and me how to play cards, with a pot of pennies as the stake 'so we would know not to gamble'. She kept her cards in an old B&H packet, and the gold looked so sophisticated - but she told us how long it had taken her to give up, and that we should never start. Not a hard lesson to take on board when both our grandmothers died of cancer. 

She taught us how to be Scrabble demons, with her official word book and refusal to let us 'throw away' high value tiles by not putting them on at least a double letter score square. And she supervised me baking, allowing me to be in charge, but gently showing me how to do things better, more intuitively - how to tilt the bowl in one arm while I mixed with the other. When my eight-year-old arms got tired, she would take over for a minute. 

She kept coming in, a morning or two a week, long after we stopped needing the supervision, long after we stopped needing the entertainment, because by then she'd become a surrogate grandmother, and we loved her as much as she did us. 

So it was probably only a couple of months since we'd seen her when she died of a heart attack in her sleep when I was 14 or 15. I was devastated - I was old enough to understand what it meant, and it was so sudden. But now, just as I hear my mother's voice when I'm making a bechamel (she's still going strong, by the way) I hear Mrs Harris when I'm whisking or beating and my arm gets tired, or trying to show the Husband the easier way to do it. I remember her best knitted red outfit, the B&H packet of cards, the smell of her powder, and the no-fuss unconditional love she gave two children she babysat. And I smile. 

Having said all that, those madeleines were actually a bit disappointing - light but anaemic, like a fat-free sponge. They disappeared quickly enough, so yesterday I could justify trying again, and I made this recipe - and used the beaters on my food processor rather than a whisk. The results are the madeleines pictured - and they're delicious, especially dipped into a cup of tea.