I Can’t Be Bothered With Room-Temperature Butter
These snack cakes are low-effort, high-reward.
I can't be bothered with room-temperature butter. Luckily, these Raspberry Friands don't require any. But that's only one reason I picked them as my bake for the week. I also had a bag of almond flour to use up.
These two-bite cakes are buttery and tender like a French financier, and the addition of fresh fruit brings in a welcome pop of brightness. The wee size only increases their charm factor (they’re tiny, have one more!), but what I love most about this recipe is that it feels like I get a lot of reward for hardly any effort.
Initially, this recipe sounds a little high maintenance—you have to brown some butter and whip a few egg whites. Neither ended up being a big deal. The butter is browned in a pan—easy enough. Then a few dry ingredients are combined in one bowl, and egg whites are whipped until thick and foamy—you don’t even have to bother with “peaks”. (But if you are wondering about peaks in meringue, read all about them here.) Those three components are then combined with a rubber spatula. Fin.
The browned butter is the last ingredient to go in and I did get the impression that it could take down the whole operation. It’s a lot of butter, and my egg white and almond flour mixture seemed too delicate to hold on to all that fat. But a few stirs and swipes later, the butter had blended in perfectly.
I find these cakes far easier to whip up than anything that uses the creaming method, so I highly recommend this recipe if you can’t be bothered with room-temperature butter or alternating dry and wet ingredients. Get the cakes straight in the preheated oven after the batter is mixed so the friands have a nice flat top with a crisp and chewy edge. Let the batter cool and they bake up with more of a rounded, puffy top. The flavor is the same, so it’s really a matter of preference.
For other berry sweets, try our Lemon-Raspberry Olive Oil Muffins, or our Strawberry and Amaretti Fool.
Baking Tip of the Week: Swapping out fresh fruit
What you’ve always suspected is true—I’m a rebel. My raspberry friands are actually strawberry-studded. I love raspberries, but not everyone else does. Maybe you forgot to put raspberries on your grocery list. Whatever the reason, you can go ahead and switch the fruit—to a point.
Our Raspberry Friands are a great example of wiggle room in baking because, largely, berries can be switched out without much trouble. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and blackberries all sit well in the middle of a friand, because the batter is thick enough to hold any of them, you only need one small berry (or berry segment), and they don’t bake for very long. Most importantly, berries hold onto their juice differently than other fruits. I wouldn’t swap in a chunk of pineapple or juicy segment of orange in these friands, for example.
Furthermore, fruit friands require only the smallest touch of fruit, so a berry swap won’t make a difference here, but that doesn’t extend to all berry recipes. When it comes to baking with large quantities of a single fruit, like in fruit pies, crumbles, or even fruit-studded cakes, stick to the intended fruit. A berry swap there might throw off the thickener or leave you with a soggy crumb.
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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
