Financiers

Eat fruit!

After skimming through Dorie Greenspan's most beautiful cook book about Parisian sweets yesterday, I decided to make something with almonds and fruit - a dainty dessert called Financiers. Dorie Greenspan describes them as a nineteenth century tea cake. However, friends, my financiers do not look like Dorie Greenspan's financiers. I realized this in the end - the recipe called for rectangular financier molds or mini-muffin pans, and well, we don't have anything other than regular muffin pans. So perhaps these are jumbo financiers. But I took a ziplock with a couple to Alice in Wonderland tonight, and if you have a sweet tooth, they certainly do the trick, providing a warm nutty sweetness.

The recipe:

Put 1 and 1/2 sticks of butter (so much butter! I'd lessen this next time or experiment with olive oil) on medium heat in a sauce pan and stir occasionally until the butter has browned. Dorie warns you not to step too far away from the pan since browned butter can quickly become black.

Add 1 cup of crushed almonds and 1 cup of sugar (I wonder if you might substitute apple sauce for sugar, too) to another pan and add 6 egg whites on low heat, stirring for about 2 minutes.

Add 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour to the almond mixture, slowly add the butter, then put the batter (I'd moved mine to a mixing bowl at this point) in the fridge for at least an hour.

Then dust your muffin pans or financier molds with flour, add the mixture -- I inserted golden raisins or pieces of plum into ours - and bake for 13 minutes at 400 degrees.

The end product: