Welcome back to our page! We hope you've all been able to enjoy a restful and relaxing Winter Break and holiday season! Going back to school comes with a lot of emotions: nervousness, excitement, happiness, and restlessness, just to name a few. One experience common to pretty much everyone going back to school is just that you just become way busier!
One thing I've found to be really helpful is to make food in advance that I can eat later, which saves me a bunch of time. I've posted in this blog before sharing a quick Spanish recipe (check out our flan recipe here!), but this time we wanted to embrace the other culture that Sharing Languages teaches about—French.
I've personally picked up a lot of baking during my Winter Break, and one French dessert that I've been really enjoying is financiers (pronounced in French as fi-nan-syé). They're these small, buttery almond cakes. They're sweet, light, golden, and moist, and usually baked in these rectangular molds (I personally don't have any rectangular molds, so I'm instead using a muffin-tin and making my financiers muffin-shaped. However, you can find a picture of the traditional rectangular financiers below). In fact, one theory for the origin of the name "financier" is that it is said to been derived from the fact that a financier's typical shape and color resemble a bar of gold!
Another great thing about financiers is that they're easy to make, and are made with ingredients that are most likely already in your pantry. This specific recipe uses brown butter to give the financier a nuttier taste than just using almonds, but it can certainly be replaced with regular butter. Similarly, almond flour can be replaced by all-purpose flour, but I think almond flour helps get a more nuanced flavor in your dessert. However, feel free to substitute or add any ingredients to your taste!
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 granulated sugar
- 3 egg whites
- 1 stick butter (Unsalted)
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup almond flour
- 1/3 cup powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
Recipe Steps (Courtesy of Letie's Culinaria!):
Preheat your oven to 400° F, and prep your muffin tin by buttering it.
Whisk together your flours, sugars, and salt until fully combined.
Now combine wet ingredients in another bowl—whisk together almond extract and egg whites until frothy.
Over low heat, melt your butter and let it brown by bringing up the heat and allowing it to simmer without stirring. Make sure you look at the pan carefully so that your butter doesn't burn! Keep it on the stove just until it turns an amber color, then remove it from the heat.
Slowly whisk together your wet and dry ingredients, and slowly add in the butter that you just browned. Keep slowly whisking until the batter becomes smooth.
Pour your batter into your muffin tin, and bake in your oven for 13-15 minutes after dropping the heat to 375° F. Use the toothpick test to check and make sure they're done! You can do so by taking a toothpick and sticking it into the thickest part of your financier—if fully baked, the toothpick should come out of your financier without any wet batter on it.
Cool for at least 15 minutes, and then take them out of the pan and enjoy however you wish! My favorite thing to do is to top my financiers with shaved almond slices, but you can also use powdered sugar, crushed almonds, or anything else you wish!
We hope you're able to make and enjoy this recipe! If you do make any of these delicate treats, make sure to send us a picture; we'd love to see them!
- Sadhana :)