Berry Friands

These were for our breakfast this morning. I baked these Berry Friands last evening as I finally bought my blueberries and blackberries after several supermarket visits over the last few days. I guess the season for blueberries is now over as I don't see supermarkets piling up with them recently, like they used to few months back when I was hooked on baking Blueberry Buckles :)

  

Friand  is a French dessert which is a small cake baked using grounded almonds and little flour. I googled for its pronunciation and this is what I found:  free ya(n) . I am not sure if traditionally it is supposed to use just egg whites or is it just this recipe that I followed called for egg whites instead of whole eggs as a lighter and healthier variation. Anyway, I set my eyes on this recipe as it uses ground almond, berries and  the friands in the photo are so pretty looking, as if they are all smiling at me :). The recipe can be found in this baking book titled "Everyday Easy Cupcakes and Cakes" which I found during my usual weekly library visit.

The original recipe yields 6 muffin-cup sized friands but as I intended to bring some to the office to share with the colleagues, I doubled the portion and gotten 12 friands. My girls like them very much and their daddy ate 2 last night and 1 this morning. I brought the remaining 5 to the office and all of them said the friands are yummy and they like the texture of the baked ground almond.

Ingredients for 12 muffin-cup Berry Friands:

• 165g icing sugar (original: 200g)
• 90g plain flour
• 150g ground almonds
• 6 large egg whites
• 150g unsalted butter, melted
• 300g fresh / frozen berries (I used blueberries, blackberries)

 Methods:

1. Preheat over at 200 degree C
2. Sift flour and icing sugar in the mixing bowl and add in ground almond, mix well
3. In a separate clean mixing bowl, whisk egg whites until it forms soft peaks. Careful not to overbeat. It should be frothy and foamy but not stiff.
4. Add in the melted butter into the  flour mixture, mix until well-combined
5. Gently fold in the flour mixture into the egg whites to form a smooth batter
6. Spoon batter into the muffin cups
7. Scatter the berries over each cups, gently press the berries down into the batter so that they all fit in
8. Baked for 30 mins or until golden brown and risen
9. Leave to cool

 Hmmm, now I need to think of what to do with the 6 egg yolks which are now resting in my fridge.....