CANELE CURIOUS: How I learned to make this finicky French pastry at home
- Cinda Chavich
- 18 hours ago
- 10 min read
Canelés, those little French pastries that are crisply caramelized on the outside and custardy in the middle, are challenging but fun to perfect.
By CINDA CHAVICH
I’m not sure exactly when I first discovered canelés, those unique little French pastries that are crisply caramelized on the outside and custardy in the middle.
It was probably during a trip to Bordeaux (where the recipe originates), but perhaps we found them while wandering Les Halles market in Lyon or at a pretty Parisian pâtisserie. But one thing is for sure — once you taste this rare treat, you will be on the lookout for the next pâtisserie that makes Canelé de Bordeaux.
Canelé (CAN-el-lay) are unique in the pastry world. They are small, fluted cakes, the rum and vanilla-spiked batter baked in a special pan at high temperatures to create the contrast of crunchy, near-burnt sugar exterior and tender pudding-like centre (imagine the flavour profile of trendy burnt Basque cheesecake or torched crème brûlée).
I know that might not sound like a perfect pastry, but if you’ve ever had one, especially in a canelé shop in France, you will understand my fixation. The soft eggy interior and burnt sugar exterior is addictive — a small, perfect, crunchy bite like no other.
And these days, if you’re lucky, you can find them outside of France. I recently encountered delicious fresh-baked canelé in Vancouver at La Bise Bakery, a kiosk in Granville Island Public Market devoted to this rare treat, an experience that fueled my obsession to create a similar pastry at home.
There are other local bakeries with canelés on their menu — whether Faubourg or Thierry in Vancouver, Little Fox Bakehouse in Richmond, or Fry’s Red Wheat Bread Bakery in Victoria — but La Bise is built on the canelé business, and its pastry chefs have mastered the art of creative canelés, with an array of toppings, from salted caramel, chocolate hazelnut and pistachio cream, to lemon meringue and bitter orange marmalade.
Founder Nicole Scriabin started the business in her own home kitchen, baking canelés for friends, before expanding to this must-visit sweet market stall. Her story gives me hope that I might perfect this Bordelaise pastry at home, too.
Scriabin’s canelé project began nearly a decade ago, a hobby turned obsession and ultimately into a complete career change. Now, she has 20 employees and turns out up to 1,200 canelés daily in high-summer season, selling them seven days a week to tourists and locals alike.
Scriabin says a good canelé should be “a journey of textures, crunchy but still chewy” with an interior that’s “soft and custardy.”
The canelés at La Bise are sold the same day they’re baked, preserving the crisp caramelized sugar exterior, but Scriabin says she prefers the slightly softer texture of the pastries on the second day, when the inside “solidifies a bit more.”
While it’s a simple recipe, the baking technique is tricky, and at La Bise, Scriabin says they are always aiming for the perfect balance, logging every step for every bake.
Temperature of ingredients, careful mixing, preparation of moulds, heat and baking times are critical, and even the slightest deviation can turn a batch from delectable to disastrous.
Making it right
The pastry originates with French nuns in the 18th century who were gifted the extra egg yolks from their local Bordeaux winemakers who were using egg whites for fining (clarifying) their red wines.
Today, there are chains of canelé shops in France, and even an official guild of canelé makers, the Brotherhood of the Canelé of Bordeaux (Confrérie du Canelé de Bordeaux), to protect the authentic canelé recipe and registered name.
Whether canelé, cannelé or canelé de Bordeaux, the shape and textural contrast of these unique little cakes are created in special ridged moulds traditionally made of copper, one of the most efficient conductors of heat.
It’s entirely counterintuitive to bake such a small pastry at such a high temperature for such a long time — 400 to 450 F for an hour or more — yet that’s the standard advice.
I wondered if the story of the canelé would include some kind of “mistake” — a batch left in the oven too long or forgotten, with the temperature cranked — but could find no evidence.
Every recipe is a little bit different, but the ingredients are pretty basic, with whole milk and/or cream, egg yolks and/or whole eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla and rum combined to create a light, pourable batter akin to a sweet crepe or custard mixture.
I did find slight variations in amounts, mixing techniques and baking temperatures, but mostly consistent advice for making these diminutive delicacies.
Scriabin, like others, insists the batter be mixed carefully by hand to ensure that excess air isn’t incorporated, and she says it must rest in the refrigerator for 24 to 48 hours to allow the flour to fully absorb and the gluten to develop, before baking.
The traditional French copper moulds are thin and lined with tin, each holding about a third of a cup of batter, and rather expensive to buy. To create that deeply browned and caramelized exterior, the little tins are coated with a mixture of melted butter and beeswax and preheated in a hot oven before the custardy batter is poured in.
These days there are silicone moulds for canelés — less expensive but, according to purists, also less likely to produce a perfectly baked pastry.
After tasting the canelés at La Bise in Vancouver, I became quite obsessed with researching recipes. There are many online tales about multiple tests and tries to get canelés just right at home, and I found lots of often antithetical advice.
In the end, it’s sort of a science experiment, Scriabin says. Even experts have bad batches, whether over- or under-baked, over-mixed or underfilled. “It’s trial and error — a daunting process but so rewarding,” she says.
Canelé learning curve
Making a perfect, evenly baked canelé is more than a recipe; it’s a process that requires strict attention to temperatures and timing. Reports of do-overs are derigeur/ubiquitous — perseverance and practice is required, a learning curve akin to achieving the ultimate sourdough loaf.
With all the canelé chatter and angst out there, I had no expectation that this would work, especially since I could not afford (or find) the French copper moulds and opted for a silicone mould, like a rubbery red muffin tin with eight fluted slots for larger canelé.
Silikomart moulds are made in Italy and designed for pastry chefs, so I was hopeful it would be the answer to affordable canelés at home. I was encouraged to later find out that Scriabin also uses silicone moulds in her high-volume operation.
After reading many recipes, I settled on the version published on Food52 by pastry guru Erin Jeanne McDowell and featured in her book The Fearless Baker. McDowell, known for her Bake It Up a Notch! and Happy Baking YouTube videos, created her canelé recipe specifically for silicone moulds, and though I tweaked her method slightly, I mostly followed her instructions.
The milk/cream mixture is scalded before adding to the whisked eggs, sugar and flour batter, and you end up with a thin custard, just thick enough to lightly coat the back of a spoon. I lightly whisked the batter by hand to avoid incorporating too much air, as instructed, and let the batter sit overnight in the refrigerator before baking in my older, somewhat inconsistent, gas-fired oven.
The results?
Well, to be honest, mixed. In the first 25 minutes in the 450 F oven, I could see the canelés rising high above the tops of the moulds, and I worried that they were overfilled.
Was the batter too airy, whisked too much? As a newbie, I had no idea. But the canelés definitely rose at least a quarter inch above the moulds.
Then, to my pleasant surprise, in the second half of the bake (when I reduced the temperature to 400 F for 30 minutes), the canelés sunk right back down into their moulds, flush with the edges, becoming very dark brown on top.
According to McDowell’s recipe, the next step was to pop the canelés out of the pan, turn them over and bake another 10 minutes to brown the tops.
This is the one downside of the silicone mould; you can’t get the indented crown of the canelé browned in an hour without this additional step.
McDowell’s instructions said “use an offset spatula,” but I just picked up the whole mould, turning it over, and the canelés fell out onto the baking tray, nicely browned all around, but still pale in the ridges. Putting them back into the moulds to “brown the tops” was easier said than done, as at this point, the canelés were still soft and getting them back into the moulds was tricky. I found using small tongs to handle the hot pastries was easiest.
They didn’t fall completely back into the cavities, but rather stuck out, I tried pressing them down, but that just squished them. Eventually, most of them settled into the moulds with a tap on the counter. Then it was back into the 400 F oven for 14 minutes to finish browning.
Scriabin was surprised when I told her about turning the canelés over to brown the tops, as she bakes her canelés about 15 minutes longer, without that step (something I may try next time). She’s also using a convection oven, which would likely improve browning.
When I removed the finished canelés from the oven and turned the mould onto a cooling rack, they fell out easily. Some looked nearly perfect, but a few had a slight tilt, creased where they collapsed when turned over in the moulds.
As they cooled, I could see the bottoms were very dark, some nearly blackened around the edges, while the indentations in the tops were still golden — an opportunity to add a dab of
filling or icing?
Otherwise, they had firmed, becoming crunchy on their exterior as they cooled, while still soft on the inside, baked through but slightly creamy.
This gave me eight canelés, and then I had to do it all over again. Each batch of batter fills the moulds twice, with exactly two cups of batter used for eight canelés.
Trouble shooting
I’ve since made a few more batches of canelés, sharing them with friends and family. It’s a long process, and a little complicated, but worth the effort.
When I had questions, I went to McDowell’s website and sent her an email. She generously replied with her thoughts.
I found that my second batch of eight canelés lacked the distinctive domed top (they were flat with no depression) and I wondered if that was a result of the mould being hot from the oven when filled the second time.
“Canelé are fairly finicky, so even slight changes can alter them (fortunately not beyond edibility),” McDowell wrote from her home in Kansas City, MO. “The mould being hot is one element that will change things, but also the period of time where the batter sits between bakes is even more influential to the end results.”
She suggested cooling the moulds before refilling, “but that also means the batter will sit longer,” she added. “It’s definitely an instance where unless you have enough moulds to bake the full amount of batter, you can likely expect a wee bit of variance.” So, buying a second mould, to bake all 16 canelés in one go, would be a good investment.
While McDowell’s canelés recipe recommends bringing the batter to room temperature before filling the buttered moulds (and heating the moulds before filling them), Scriabin says she always makes sure her moulds are buttered and then chilled before baking canelés, with the batter used cold from the refrigerator, too.
Both bakers emphasize the need to rest the batter for 24 to 48 hours (Scriabin is in the 36- to 48-hours camp) but no more. The gluten will become overdeveloped, she says, and the canelés will rise, then collapse.
And if you don’t succeed, do try, try again. Making canelés is a challenge that’s almost as addictive as eating them — it could become a new calling.
La Bise Bakery
Granville Island Public Market1689 Johnston St., Kiosk 150, Vancouver236.268.7066 | @labisebakery
Erin Jeanne McDowell
TIPS AND TROUBLESHOOTING
Get the basics right
Rest the batter for 24 to 48 hours before baking – no longer, or the gluten will overdevelop and the canelés may collapse.
For the best texture, weigh ingredients rather than measuring by volume.
Fill moulds leaving ¼ inch of space at the top – they’ll rise, then settle during baking.
Mould management
Butter moulds thoroughly. Try both methods:
Erin Jeanne McDowell suggests heating the buttered moulds and bringing the batter to room temperature before baking.
Scriabin chills the buttered moulds and uses cold batter straight from the fridge.
If reusing moulds, let them cool completely be- fore refilling. Hot moulds can flatten the tops.
Consider investing in a second set of moulds to bake all at once for consistent results.
I invested in other moulds after my initial "red silicone" Silkomart moulds. I tried French Elastomoule moulds from De Buyer
(after a local French baker insisted they were superior) and even purchased a few individual carbon steel moulds (expensive at $15 apiece), but really found little difference in the bakes. Having enough moulds for a full batch of batter (i.e. 16 canelés) solved some of my consistency issues.
Baking and serving
Best enjoyed the day they’re made for that perfect crisp shell and creamy interior.
Store loosely covered at room temperature for up to two days — they’ll become chewier (still tasty).
To refresh, re-crisp in a hot oven for five min- utes before serving.
Can be frozen individually (wrapped in plastic); thaw and warm before eating.
Don’t be discouraged by imperfect batches — every attempt teaches you something new. The process is part of the pleasure!
This story originally appeared in
Edible Vancouver & Wine Country magazine
©CindaChavich2025
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