26 January 2013

Financiers — and a Saturday morning surprise

There was a bright moon shining last night, and I can actually see outside this morning by some kind of moonglow (I guess). Another reason I can see out, I think, is that it's all white out there. We had a surprise snowfall during the night. All the snow from last weekend had melted, and the outdoor decor was back to green. But not this morning. Luckily, I don't have to go anywhere today, and neither does Walt. Not by car, I mean.

View out the front window at 8:05 a.m. today

I just went and stuck my hand out the window, and I can feel that it is still snowing lightly. We're supposed to have a good thaw this weekend so the snow probably won't last long. It may turn into rain this morning. I wonder if the bread lady will make it up the hill. We would normally expect her at sunrise (the sun rises at 8:26 today). If this snow was predicted, I completely missed hearing about it. It's my morning to walk the dog, too.

A batch of Financiers

Over the past couple of days, we've had a chance to use our new silicone Financiers pan a couple of times. I've posted about Financiers, the little French "gold bar" almond cakes, several times over the years,  here in 2007 and here about a year ago. Their distinctive feature is that they are made with almond flour (ground almonds, poudre d'amandes) and egg whites. No yolk (ha ha ha).

Financiers: very sweet, slightly sticky, and crispy around the edges

For the Financier batter, the egg whites are not beaten at all — so the batter is easy and quick to make. It has a lot of butter and sugar in it. The little cakes come out very sweet, slightly sticky, and a little crispy around the edges. I think they are amazingly good (à consommer avec modération, bien sûr). I was going to post the recipe here, but I see that I translated and posted it back in 2007, so you can get it there.

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 This 15 lb. pork shoulder cost  just over 13 euros and cooked in the oven for 10 hours.

By the way, I ended up getting just about 6½ lbs. (3 kg) of lean pulled pork from that 15 lb. bone-in, skin-on épaule de porc that I roasted a couple of days ago. It cooked in a very slow oven (just over 200ºF or 100ºC) for 10 hours — to an internal temperature nearly that high. It then cooled overnight before I lifted off the crispy skin and pulled the meat off the bones. I froze the pulled pork in one-pound packages for meals in February and March. I'll spare you all the pictures.

11 comments:

  1. We had snow forecast for yesterday evening, but it didn't start until 3.00am. By 3.20 it had finished snowing, so this morning I swept the street before the council can compress the snow into ice.

    It was a bit pretty though.

    (I am not commenting on cake based goodness. evil, evil stuff! mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm cake.....)

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  2. Those financiers look simply delish....now I feel like baking.

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  3. Walt made two more batches of Financiers yesterday afternoon. We will have to take extra-long walks with the dog for the next few days.

    A secret: you can make the same cakes with 4 whole eggs instead of 8 eggwhites. They're even richer.

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  4. no... we wanna see how that pulled pork ended up! great work. and check this out - that vid you gave me. TOTALLY fixed my pastry problem.. this latest round of croissants turned out perfectly. i raise my chocolat chaud to you!
    http://adventuresinthegoodland.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-about-little-petit-dejeuner.html
    :-D
    ps i'm guessing that since you were a carolina boy that your pulled pork is more vinegar? is there slaw involved?

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  5. Yes, OFG, there is vinegar, and there is slaw. I should have made hushpuppies, but we made do with the bread from the village bakery.

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  6. Your pork roast was beautiful, too bad you don't have any sweet bbq sauce to go on it ;-)

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  7. Ha ha ha Evelyn. Maybe some strawberry jello? Actually, I'll probably be putting some sweet and spicy hot Asian sauce on some of it.

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  8. I had forgotten about those Financiers. That's a good recipe to suggest to mes élèves when they want to make something French for class :)

    That's LOTS of pork! Don't worry, OFG, I bet we'll see photos of dinner the first time he uses some (won't we, Ken?)

    How long did it take you to shred that many pounds of pork, Ken?

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  9. Excellent timing. I made semifreddo for Page's birthday, and have 7 egg whites left over. I also have a bag of ground almonds in the freezer.

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  10. Those Financiers do look very good.

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  11. Ken,
    Before you told me, I had never heard about financiers, not the Wall Street variety. As I suspected, Google tells me that financiers and friands aux amandes are the same thing, or at least the same recipe. I just love friands, so I’d probably enjoy the ones you bake.

    I don’t know about financiers, but I found out you can make friands with a lot of different ingredients.

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