Chronicle Books Blog

When we put out a call for your most beloved madeleine recipes back in November, we expected a healthy response. We expected (as we always do from our talented readers) an assortment of delicious and tried-and-true methods for making variations on the madeleine—maybe one with chocolate, maybe one with a glaze. What we didn’t expect was an influx of breathless excitement and exclamation-point–studded e-mails; personal stories of lives intertwined with these delectable treats, of madeleines baked for soldiers abroad or to comfort a spouse living far from his home country, of madeleines used to sway members of a zoning board or satisfy restless kids on interminable shopping trips; and we certainly didn’t expect a vast and mouth-watering variety of recipes that not even the wildest baker could have dreamed up on her own—Pistachio cardamom madeleines! Rosemary polenta madeleines! Chocolate olive oil! Apple buckwheat with sea salt caramel!

Well, that’s what we got.

So we got out our madeleine pans and set to work reading your stories and testing your recipes. Over the past three months, scores of madeleines were baked, hundreds of fingers licked clean of batter, dozens of bags of flour used up, and countless friends and colleagues enlisted as taste-testers. Amazingly, though the perfect little madeleine shell-shape remained unchanged from batch to batch, each recipe had such unique and diverse flavors that not a one of us were sick of madeleines by the time the whole process was over. Our taste buds (if not our waistlines) thank you.

And the result of all this grueling effort is the forthcoming We Love Madeleines, hitting bookshelves this coming October. You’ll recognize it by the as-yet-unreleased cover, which I feel confident personally dubbing The Cutest Book Cover In The Universe, and inside you’ll find more than 40 delicious and approachable madeleine recipes (plus glazes and other toppings!), more than half of which came from kitchen-savvy Chronicle fans.

As we ooh and ahh over the fruits of our labor here at the Chronicle offices, October just seems like too long to wait to share the excitement! So here’s a sneak preview of one of the marvelous madeleine recipes from the book to get you as revved up as we are for this tres mignonne baking book. Yum!

Honey-Almond Madeleines
3/4 cup/90g cake flour, plus more for dusting the pan
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup/100 g sugar
1/4 cup almond paste
2 tbsp honey
6 tbsp/85 g unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus more for greasing the pan
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Into a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the eggs, sugar, and almond paste on low speed until just combined. Increase the speed to medium and beat until the mixture is light and airy and has increased in volume, 5 to 6 minutes. Reduce the speed to low, add the flour mixture, and beat until just combined. Using a rubber spatula, fold in the honey, melted butter, and vanilla until well blended. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to 24 hours.

About 20 minutes before you are ready to bake, position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 375ºF/190°C/gas 5. Grease a madeleine pan with melted butter and dust with flour, tapping out any excess.

Spoon or pipe the batter into the prepared pan, filling each mold about three-quarters full. Do not smooth out the batter. Bake until the madeleines are puffed up and the edges are just starting to turn brown, 7 to 9 minutes.

Immediately turn out the madeleines onto a wire rack and let cool. Wipe out the pan and let cool. Re-grease and re-flour the pan, re-fill, and continue baking until all the batter has been used. Serve warm or at room temperature the same day they are made, but if you need to store them, layer them in a wide, shallow container with a tight-fitting lid. Use waxed paper to separate the layers if you want to stack them.

Makes about 18 madeleines.

Kate Willsky
Editorial Assistant

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Author Nadia Gordon’s Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mysteries are a series of mystery novels that engage both the imagination and the senses. Set in Northern California’s wine country, the food and wine of the region figure prominently as chef Sunny McCoskey finds herself deep in intrigue among the vineyards and her own restaurant.

This unique combination makes this book a natural pick for mystery-minded foodies and oenophiles. One such fan is celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis, who chose Lethal Vintage (the fourth book in the series) for her first book club episode on her Food Network TV show, Giada at Home. In the episode, Giada cooks a menu inspired by the book and serves it to her club. While the ladies chat about the book they enjoy a radicchio, pear, arugula salad; grilled scallops with orange scented quinoa; and lemon meringue with amaretti cookie topping. Get the recipes here.

Lethal Vintage is also available as an e-book from iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Sony.

Giada at Home airs on Saturdays at 11:30am/10:30am central.

April Whitney
Publicist

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Opening “spread” of Ali Bosworth’s book, Atlantic.

I was curious and excited to stumble upon booksonline.fr this week (by way of a post on Ali Bosworth on Booooooom). According to this piece in the New York Times, booksonline.fr was created by French graphic designer Pierre Hourquet.

The site minimally presents short “books” of photographs. Each book is a sequence of images put together and titled (presumably) by one photographer. They are fun to flip through. The limited amount of images is just enough for easy online browsing. The shortness of each piece allows the viewer to contemplate and enjoy the photographer’s pairings and overall ordering of pictures.

Some spreads that struck me:

From Concresence by David Zilber.

From Home and Away by Wyne Veen.

From Honey Blood by Suzanna Zak.

I’d love to hear what people think about the cover treatments. Here are a couple of examples:

Cover of Veen’s Home and Away.

Cover of Zak’s Honey Blood.

When I first looked at the site, I found the covers to be generic and I missed the use of imagery to lure me in. It’s an antithetical approach to what we do with cover designs here at Chronicle (to say the least). However, the more I flip through the books on the site, the more I appreciate that the minimal cover treatment lends to the discovery and surprise of what is “inside,” as well as creating a uniform sensibility for the site overall. I also enjoy that the minimal treatment forces focus onto the wording of the title and how the title relates to the images.

Another thing that I find interesting, and again, I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this, is how this online format uses the conventions of books to such advantage. I am often delighted by (and purchasing) small physical books, and I find that these small digital books elicit a similar response. If they were presented differently, would they be as delightful? If their contents were dislodged from the somewhat ridiculous page turning device and grey ruled outlines of the “pages” would they feel as complete? I don’t think so. I think they would then feel like merely another collection of images posted online, a transient moment of shared beautiful pictures, subject to change or deletion at any moment.

Brooke Johnson
Senior Designer

Anna Corba, creator of the beyond charming Doodling in French, is our guest blogger this week.

My friend, Jo Packham, woman of a thousand ideas, asked if I would be interested in doing a doodle book. But of course, I answered, knowing full well that I don’t doodle but unable to say no to an opportunity to create that wonder of all entities… a book! When it came time to do the proposal I thought hard about how I could take Jo’s idea and turn it into something that was “mine.” I went back to the root of my first creative endeavors many moons ago—sketching—and decided to combine this with collage, something I’ve been playing with for the past decade. When I looked around my studio for those first little images to draw, what did I see but so many things from my travels to France. A latte bowl, a fleur de lys covered pastry bag, a stack of cartes postales. It took a few afternoons to realize what I was up to, but it eventually dawned on me that I was doodling in French. Aha! A book of my own was born, one which became a labor of love from that moment forward.

Surrounded each day with decorative papers and vintage ephemera that I’ve gathered from flea markets through the years, I would begin with an assortment of scraps that could be an inspiring background for the drawing itself. I would then find ways to incorporate these random bits into a collage, building a story or simply providing a nostalgic “home” of sorts. It was great fun using my collections… postage stamps, handwritten letters, old receipts—all were fair game. Each page was cut and paste, I never used a computer. This was a maddening process at times, but for the most part, greatly satisfying for someone who still likes the feel of paper and scissors in my hands. In fact, once I got going, it was hard to stop.

These days, sketching has become a part of my process again and I’m thankful for this adventure that brought me full circle.

Are you a Francophile, and if so, what’s your favorite iconic French thing? Leave a comment on Anna’s post below and you’ll be eligible to win a copy of Doodling in French that we’ll reward to one randomly selected mademoiselle or monsieur (giveaway valid in the US and Canada only). Bonne chance!

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I love it when a book gives you the power to make someone’s day. See the Beauty Here, a brand new book of sixteen reusable and completely uplifting stencils, does just that. When I received my copy a few weeks ago, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try to surprise some of my favorite people – the Chronicle Books staff. I decided to stencil “Today is your day” inside the kitchen cabinet where the coffee cups are stored. Inspiration plus a caffeine fix… hopefully it helped the Chronicle coffee drinkers take the day by storm.

When used with paint, chalk, or markers, the sturdy card stock stencils can be wiped clean and reused multiple times. So I challenged my colleagues to use the stencils to spread some cheer around the office. You can imagine they brought lots of smiles to the faces of their coworkers! Here’s what they came up with.

Kate Woodrow
Editor (Kate was the editor of See the Beauty Here)
We all need a little levity in our lives. Especially when faced with facts and figures on a white board. To my diligent colleagues in sales, always crunching numbers and long hours in Conference Room A, I wish you much beauty when a meeting gives you boredom.

Lorena Jones
Publishing Director
Lorena used her stencil to thank John Carlson, Executive Director of Operations, “for killing it on reprints!”

Allison Weiner
Designer
I stenciled “be who you want to be” in watercolor, and added a line—”not what others want to see” —and posted it on the bathroom mirror at work. We all could use that reminder once in a while!

Sarah Wharton
Marketing Assistant
As a company with a real sweet tooth, I knew my coworkers would appreciate finding these brownies in the kitchen. Who couldn’t use another reason to smile on a Friday?

Lisa Tauber
Editorial Assistant
The “follow your bliss” stencil was one that I had suggested when we were brainstorming stencils, so naturally I wanted to see it in action. And I chose glitter because, well, who doesn’t like something sparkly? I first thought to put it above a photocopy machine in our supply room, but as I walked by the brick wall with a printer underneath a clock, that seemed like the perfect place to add a friendly and inspiring message.

Ali Presley
Online Marketing Manager
I thought it’d be nice to give a boost to the whole company, so I hung this glittery sign on the main elevator doors. When the doors opened, it pulled apart and then went back together. It was so cute!

Alyson Pullman
Publicist, Stationery
I chose to stencil “You Are Perfect” in the Chronicle Books bathroom to surprise my unsuspecting co-workers. Everyone should be reminded they are perfect in their own way and appreciated by the people that they see day in and day out.

Albee Dalbotten
Associate Marketing Director
I stenciled a note to everyone at Chronicle Books that commutes by bike! My sign reads “Take the Scenic Route” and is hanging in the corridor where people keep their bikes during the day.

Laura Lee Mattingly
Editor
Here is my stencil bomb! I taped it to the wall in a drab little phone room to brighten people’s days as they leave their conference calls.

Holden Hardcastle
Digital Production Coordinator
The connection I have with my stuffed Boo is wonderful. He surprised me with the stencil bomb letting me know he felt the same way.

Happening upon an unexpected affirmation like this can instantly improve your mood and linger in your mind. How would you use these stencils to inspire?

Lorraine Woodcheke
Marketing & Publicity Manager