A smell of caramel and toasted hazelnut escaping from the oven — that’s the signal that something good is happening. Financiers are one of those cakes that seem complex from a pastry shop window, yet they’re made with five ingredients and less than 40 minutes. The brown butter technique changes everything.
Ingredients :
- Butter (115 g) — This is what gives the financier its character. It is not simply melted: it is cooked until the brown butter stage, which develops aromatic compounds absent from regular butter. Use good quality unsalted butter — preferably churned butter, whose fats react better to heat and brown more evenly.
- Almond flour (60 g) — It provides the moist texture and characteristic flavor of the financier. Prefer a fine, white flour — called blanched, without the brown skin — to avoid small dark dots in the batter. A coarse flour makes the financier slightly grainy and changes the chew, not disastrous, but less elegant.
- Powdered sugar (150 g) — Powdered sugar dissolves instantly in unwhipped egg whites and gives a smooth, homogeneous batter without effort. Regular granulated sugar would create a grainier texture on the surface and alter the caramelization during baking — you’d see the difference.
- Egg whites (4 pieces) — They are not whipped, that’s intentional. Incorporating whipped egg whites would inflate the financier excessively and make it lose its characteristic density. What we want is a moist binder, not a foam. Cold or room temperature egg whites work equally well; what matters is not to overmix after adding them.
