Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Christmas financiers - nothing to do with Wall Street! And two dead cakes!!

Today, our current colleague from France brought in some financiers. No, not a couple of her banker friends but the French pastry kind. Acording to Wikipedia, a financier is a small French cake. The financier is light and moist, similar to sponge cake, and usually contains almond flour, crushed or ground almonds, or almond flavoring. The distinctive feature of the recipe is beurre noisette. According to Wikipedia, beurre noisette is a warm butter sauce that can be used to accompany many foods, such as winter vegetables, pasta, fish, omelettes, and chicken. The sauce is also frequently used in French pastry production. (I figured I'd make that clarification for you and save you from looking beurre noisette up.)
 Mes financiers et moi! And I don't mean bankers!
Two containers with several shapes!
Notice the heart shaped one!
And several round mini-cakes!
The cakes our friend produced were indeed small cakes.  They were slightly larger than bite size - two bite size?. There were three different shapes - small loaf like, round and heart shaped!! Apparently our baker has some financier form pans readily available. I think I have actually seen them at Williams Sonoma - but I digress!  The heart shapes got eaten first. (Aww!) I guess we are a bunch of softies. They were all dusted with some confectioner's sugar which helped with the presentation if not our caloric intake. Nonetheless, they were quite good and were a perfect pre-holiday treat!
The perfect holiday treat!!
We also took care of some unfinished business - two of the cakes from the last few days were finished off by our best cake maws.  If you check out the post about the Star Wars cake, you can see what remained after that day. Our Star Wars fan knocked off the remaining parts in two sittings. The party cake remnant was almost totally eaten but a tiny piece remained for another day. The guy just couldn't get the deed done as with the Star Wars cake!
A Cake Hour Jedi for sure!
Still some of that double chocolate!
Dude, I am going to eat that and then some!
Alas, he couldn't do it. The Force wasn't with him and a bit remains. Tomorrow?


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