Thursday 4 March 2010

chocolate chip friands

I've managed to find time over the last couple of weeks to do a bit more baking and well, I'm loving it! There's assorted baked goodies sitting on the kitchen bench ready-to-eat, more of my cookbooks are getting used, I get to spend time in the kitchen, other's are benefiting from eating it, I say it's win-win for all. Although with the amount of baking I've been doing, I am a little shocked/surprised by how many ingredients I have stocked at home, so far I haven't had to run out to the supermarket yet. I swear, I finish a packet of flour and there's another one there waiting to be used!

Anyway, after taking a good look at the inventory, I figured I better start using things up. It took a bit of flipping through recipes and cookbooks to find the recipes that I had all the ingredients for at home and in this instance, J helped me out by saying he wanted friands (this narrowed down the search considerably - trust me, I can spend hours buried in my cookbooks!). The following recipe is from  The Australian Woman's Weekly 'BAKE':

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Grease 9 holes of a friand pan.  (FYI: I usually grease mine by smearing butter onto a paper towel.) The original recipe is actually for mini friands but given I have a friand pan at home, I figured I may as well use it. According to the recipe, if you are making mini ones, you can grease 2x 12 hole mini muffin pans.

Place 4 egg whites in a bowl; beat with a fork. Stir in 125g melted butter, 2/3 cup almond meal, 3/4 cup sifted icing sugar, and 1/4 cup plain flour.

Measure out 100g chocolate chips.

Stir chocolate chips into the batter.

Spoon mixture into pan holes.

Bake friands for 15 minutes.

Stand friands in the pan for about 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool.

The recipe says to the turn the pan for the friands to come out. Mine didn't and it was quite time consuming to wedge each one out without breaking them; I ended up having the one casualty which got eaten straight away (by me!)

Gobbling one up!

Feedback from mum was that she found these quite heavy. The boy only had one (my gut feel is that he was full from the one too but didn't say anything), I actually didn't mind them too much. They were a break from the usual berry friands that I make and well, I love chocolate! (although, as you can see from the pic above, it is a bit of a chocolate overload if you're not a big fan of chocolate - the ratio is almost 50% batter to 50% chocolate).

In hindsight, I can see why the original recipe makes a batch of 24 mini friands. Mini friands would definitely be easier to eat, you could gobble up whereas these big ones make for a whole meal. Then again, I probably would've cursed considerably trying to wedge 24 mini friands out of the tins - why is it that friands always stick? It baffles me.

Anyway, if you have any suggestions for recipes that use choc chips, let me know. I have plenty of them in the pantry!

9 comments:

Mark @ Cafe Campana said...

I think mini friands would be pretty cool.

Rita (mademoiselle délicieuse) said...

Must be the combination of almond meal, butter and sugar - mine always stick a little too. My recipe makes mini friands and I find it helps to use a toothpick to lever each friand out from the side of the pan cavities.

char said...

yum ! miss panda, it seems you've been tirelessly baking ! :)

A cupcake or two said...

I like Friands. Its good to see Friands that are not shaped as Friands ehehe. Look at all those chocolatey bits. Delicious

Anonymous said...

Chocolate chip pie! Okay, I don't know how I came up with that. Maybe chocolate chip bundt cake. I love bundt cake. I think it may just be the shape, like how I love the shape of your friands. I'm odd aren't i!

Lorraine @ Not Quite Nigella said...

Oooh look at all of those choc chips! You got the right ratio Panda! :D

SK said...

Very nice looking friands! You should try fruits rather than chocolate for your next batch.

panda said...

mark - i do like things mini but i find that they can actually be quite tedious to make and more chance of things going wrong (although that could just be me :P)

mademoiselle delicieuse - yep yep, i already do that with a toothpick/skewer. have a feeling it's cause i'm impatient and yank them out too quickly!

char - thanks! i find baking rather relaxing :)

a cupcake or two - i was never a big fan of friands but i think with that many chocolate bits, i can grow to like them :)

vickys - you make me laugh! now that you've mentioned bundt cake, i need to use that bundt pan that i bought..hmmm..what can I make?!

lorraine - i'm glad to have someone that agrees with me :)

sk - i usually do use fruits so thought i'd be a bit different this time with the chocolate. there's a few other friand recipes i have bookmarked (amongst them are citrus ones) so can't wait till I get to those :)

Joanna said...

yummmmmmm......