HyoJu Park was just 14 when she made her first batch of madeleines. Fast forward 16 years and HyoJu and her partner Rong Yao Soh now have a Melbourne patisserie dedicated to turning out reimagined versions of the delicate little butter cakes.

Madeleine de Proust is named after a poetic expression in France that is used to describe smells, tastes, sounds or sensations from childhood. The saying stems from a scene in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the 1913 novel by French writer Marcel Proust, in which his mum offers him tea and a warm madeleine.

As HyoJu tells it, from that time on the literary great found the act of dipping the shell- shaped cake in tea a deeply comforting ritual that invoked this precious childhood memory. When HyoJu first heard of the metaphor, sometimes called “the Proust effect”, she saw an opportunity to use it to market her madeleines.

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“I also have good memories of the madeleine,” says the pastry chef, who met her Malaysian-born partner Rong in 2016 when they were studying Culinary Arts and Management at the University of West London.

“When I heard there was an expression that referenced the madeleine it made a lot of sense to me to dedicate the bakery to nostalgia. The madeleine was the first item I ever baked. And the ‘madeleine moment’ mirrors my own nostalgic childhood memories of this treat,” says HyoJu, who grew up in the South Korean city of Gwangyang.

“At the same time I was baking madeleines I was watching the K-drama Nae Ireumeun Kim Sam-soon (My Name is Kim Sam-soon) where the female lead was a pastry chef who described the madeleine as ‘a sexy cookie’ because of its glamorous shape,” says HyoJu.

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HyoJu and Rong now turn out about 240 innovative versions of the so-called sexy cookies per day at the 18-seater bakery, which is styled like a contemporary Melbourne milk bar on buzzy Lygon Street. If the DayGlo orange PVC curtain imprinted with the word Madeleines doesn’t do enough to entice customers to sample the small sponge cakes, the glass counter displaying 12 different moulded iterations certainly makes a case for their merits.

HyoJu and Rong first joined forces at the two-Michelin starred Mingles, in Seoul, followed by London’s Galvin at Windows. HyoJu also trained at Roux at the Landau at The Langham, London, and worked alongside Ben Shewry as Attica’s first head pastry chef.

HyoJu says the secret to nailing the light-as-air cakes relies on using “the very best quality ingredients”: the extra-fine flour and fluted moulds are imported from Japan; the pastry brushes from France.

HyoJu says one mouthful of a madeleine is enough to transport her back to her childhood growing up in South Korea. She says “ssuk” (mugwort) is the main ingredient in the signature madeleine, a Korean flavour she says is embedded in her DNA.

“My grandma always made rice cakes with ssuk when I was a kid. When I smell ssuk, the memory of my grandma comes flooding back to me,” she says.

Childhood memories also inspire the seasonal flavours of the madeleine flecked with heugimja (black sesame seeds) in honour of a famous rice cake shop near HyoJu’s sister’s house and the pandan coconut madeleine, which tells a story of Rong’s upbringing in Batu Pahat in Malaysia.

Madeleine de Proust is located at 253 Lygon Street, Carlton; madeleinedeproust.com.au

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