Friands

A couple of days ago in my post,  "Getting in the mood for French, I shared some photos of the friands I made for two young ladies studying hard for their French oral exam. (By the way, both girls feel they did very well in their exam Tuesday.  Some of Genevieve's nerves were offset by having a very handsome French examiner.  She'll kill me for adding that bit!) Some of my followers have never heard of friands so I thought I would share with you my recipe.  You can find an explanation of what a friand is here.

Here is a reminder of what they look like.

As you can see I was a little heavy handed with the icing sugar.  :)

These are friand the baking tins I use.  I have two.

BLUEBERRY FRIANDS
Makes 12

150g ground almonds (almond meal)
1 1/4 cups pure icing sugar, sifted *
3/4 cup gluten-free plain flour **
1 lemon, rind finely grated
150g butter, melted and cooled
150g punnet blueberries, or raspberries ***

1.  Preheat oven to 200C.  Grease 12 friand pans (you can also use 12 x 1/3 cup capacity muffin pans).
2.  Place almonds, sugar, flour and lemon rind into a bowl.  Mix well to combine.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk egg whites with a fork until frothy.  Add to flour mixture.  Mix until just combined.  Stir in melted butter.  Gently fold through berries.
4.  Spoon mixture in to pan holes so they are three-quarters full.  Bake for 20 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.   Stand in pan for 10 minutes, Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

*  I used icing sugar mix instead of pure icing sugar as that was what I had in the pantry.
**  I'm sure you could use ordinary plain flour.  I would normally but had some gluten free flour leftover from when gluten intolerant guests were staying, so decided to use it up.
***  I used a 400g tin of blueberries which I drained.  The friands had lots of blueberries, but they were delicious.

There is one thing about a friand recipe which is annoying and that is what do you do with the leftover egg yolks.  I decided to make lemon curd and the following recipe uses 4 yolks which meant only one went to  waste.


LEMON CURD
4 egg yolks
150 grams caster sugar
100 mls lemon juice
70 grams butter, cut into small cubes
1.Place the egg yolks and sugar into a bowl and beat using an electric mixer until the sugar has dissolved. You'll know when the sugar is dissolved when the mix no longer feels gritty when rubbed between your finger tips.
2.  Put this mixture in a small saucepan along with the lemon juice and butter and place over a low heat. Whisk constantly until it almost reaches boiling point - you'll notice that it will begin to thicken quite quickly and at this stage take it off the heat. At this stage it will have the consistency of a thick custard.
3.  Once off the heat, whisk again and then pour it immediately into hot, sterilised jars. Seal and allow to cool and then store in the fridge.

I found the recipe here, http://cookalmostanything.blogspot.com/2008/05/lemon-curd.html#ixzz1bqSkS2s9

I hope you have a try at making friands sometime.   You'll enjoy them, I promise.

Anne  xx