Baking Bouchon - Recipe 28 - Financiers

These sound so fancy!  There are two theories on how these cakes got their name.  The first says that because they are shaped like little rectangles they resemble bars of gold.  (You'll be really confused in a minute when you see that mine are not shaped like bars of gold.  They're shaped like squares of gold because I didn't want to buy yet another baking pan.  Do they make squares of gold?)  The second theory says  that the cake became popular in the financial district of Paris surrounding the Paris Stock Exchange.

I'd like to think of these little guys as the great granddaddy of the cupcake.  I have no idea if that's actually true but it sounds like it should be.

I made two flavors of financiers, traditional and chocolate.  The recipes were pretty similar so I decided to tackle both at the same time.

There are two distinctive ingredients in a financier, both of which give it a complex, nutty flavor.  The first is almond flour.  Check.

The second is browned butter.  Browning butter is kind of a cool thing.  You melt butter and let it cook for a few minutes which evaporates some of the moisture in the butter and turns it a beautiful, light shade of brown.  It completely alters the taste of the butter giving it a nutty flavor.

The batter comes together pretty easily.

For the traditional financiers, you combine regular flour, almond flour and sugar, then mix in a few egg whites.

The hot brown butter is added next.  The butter should still be hot when added to the batter so that it emulsifies properly.  Apparently, if it is not hot, it will get all chunky and separated.  Ewwwww, gross.  Luckily, I did not experience this phenomenon.





The chocolate batter is pretty similar.

The only difference is that cocoa powder replaces some of the all purpose flour in the dry ingredients.  Plus, there are two types of melted chocolate that are added to the hot brown butter before it is added to the batter.

The chocolate batter ended up being significantly thicker than the traditional batter.  It also bakes for a shorter period of time.  I have no idea why because the weight of dry ingredients in both batters are exactly the same.  I bet it has to do with.... science.

I tasted these little guys right out of the oven, because I usually love warm cake.  These guys?  Meh.  Not so much.

These cakes actually tasted better when they cooled because the outsides got just a little bit crispy which gave them a little more textural interest.

CA and I disagree about these little cakes.  He really likes them.  He says the brown butter flavor and crispy exterior is just excellent.  I'm still not sold that they're all that amazing.  The traditional one tastes like a mildly interesting butter cake.  The chocolate one tastes like a brownie and there's only one thing I want to do with a brownie... warm it up and put ice cream on it.  But I don't have any ice cream.

Instead I stacked a traditional on top of a chocolate and made a little diversity tower  Then I ate it.

Julie