Raspberry Friands

These things are more than just really cute (yes, it is possible for a food to be adorable, as it turns out); they're also really good. Made with almond flour, fresh raspberries, and way more sugar than you'd like, they're the perfect little cakes for tea or hot chocolate or eating just because, and an excellent blend of sweet almondy cake and tart, seedy raspberries. Yum.

See what I mean by "cute"?

Friands

From Use Real Butter, who says the recipe is "slightly modified from Donna Hay’s Modern Classics 2"

4 oz (125g or 1/2 cup if you're boring and still use that system) butter, unsalted

1 cup almond meal

1 2/3 cups confectioner’s sugar

3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

5 egg whites (it's a lot of whites, so you might feel bad about wasting all those yokes. Make an omelette or ice cream or just throw them away)

1/2 tsp almond extract (optional) I recommend it, it adds the best bit of almondy goodness

1/3/ cup raspberries, fresh (or any berries)

Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C). Place butter in a saucepan over low heat and cook until melted and a light golden color. Set aside.

Place the almond meal, confectioner’s sugar, flour, and baking powder in a bowl and whisk to combine.

Stir the egg whites into the dry mix until combined.

Pour in the butter and stir until completely combined. Stir in the almond extract (optional).

Grease a dozen 1/2 cup capacity muffin tins or tins of any type. I actually went out and bought a square-tinned pan because I felt like it made it fancier. Also, I didn't want people to automatically think they were muffins, because they're really nothing like them.

Spoon 2 tablespoons of batter into each tin and plop a few berries on top. Bake 15-20 minutes or until the tops are golden and spring back when you touch them. Makes a dozen (or more). I actually had enough batter leftover for a thirteenth, but it didn't seem worth it, so I just added it to a few of the other squares. It kind of enveloped the berries a little, so I don't really recommend that if you're going for looks. You want to be able to see all the berries.

Trout

I'm not an enormous fan of fish, especially the really fishy-fish, like trout. But my friend Autumn had some trout and we thought "what-the-hey let's make it." So we did. And I'm told it was deeelicious (my part didn't actually get cooked all the way, so I couldn't eat it after the first initial bites, but Autumn loved hers, and I'll take her word for it).

It was prepared sort of make-shift-ly because 1. I've never made trout before, let alone a whole fish 2. We're college kids, so we used what was on hand (ie limes instead of lemons, which turned out to be a really excellent choice)

Anyway, so we stuffed it and surrounded it with butter, sliced up some limes, covered it in garlic salt and basil, and popped it in the oven for about 25 minutes at 350 degrees. Of course, Autumn has a really weird/tempermental oven, and the top side wasn't entirely cooked through (see above) and I could seriously taste the river it came from (it was fished out by Friend Paul from a river somewhere in southern Utah). But it smelled heavenly and as I mentioned before, Autumn said it tasted really good.

We ate it with rotini in cream sauce and sauteed zucchini and tomatoes. Yum.