Raspberry and lemon friands

Recently I've been exceptionally clumsy whilst in the kitchen, and seem to burn myself on everything I touch. For instance: I burt my thumb on the side of the pan while taking these out of the oven, and got to use some of my very favourite square words, the ones I save for special occasions. And the other day I burnt my finger on a cheese toastie. Not even the toastie machine, but the hot molten cheese inside as I cut it. It blistered straight away too. But I guess, the bonus of burning your digits on hot food things is that in the time in takes to run your burn under cold water, your treat is cooling down to optimal consuming temperature.

Friands are delish and underrated, in my opinion. It's so easy to make them gluten free, and unlike muffins, you put the flavours on the top of the batter. So if you want three different types of friand in one batch, you can! These ones use the whole egg, not just the white, so you aren't stuck with a buttload of yolks to try to find uses for.

Raspberry and lemon friands

100 grams butter

1/3 cup gluten free plain flour (or rice flour)

1 1/3 cups icing sugar

1 cup almond meal

zest of one lemon

3 eggs

a whole lot of raspberries (frozen is fine and what I used.)

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Grease a muffin tin (or a friand tin, if you have one) with butter or cooking spray. Melt butter in a small saucepan over a low heat and cook for one minute or until butter turns golden.
2. Sift flour and icing sugar into a mixing bowl, stir in almond meal and lemon zest.
3. Lightly beat eggs with a fork and stir both eggs and butter into dry ingredients until well combined. Mixture will be quite thin and not what you expect it to be, don't panic and re-read all the instructions to make sure you haven't missed something, this is what it's supposed to look like. Spoon mixture into tin, filling each two-thirds full. Press raspberries into the top of the batter (original recipe said TWO raspberries but come on now, let's not be miserable with the rasperries, jeez).
4. Bake in pre-heated oven for 15-20 minutes, til golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
5. Cool in tins for 5 minutes, then turn onto wire rack to cool completely. Dust with icing sugar prior to serving. Makes 9 large muffin sized friands.

I can imagine passionfruit and blueberry would be pretty good, I added a wee bit of stewed rhubarb to these ones too because we had some but you couldn't tell. Chocolate would be awesome, so would caramel. Marshmallow, even?! Maybe all three together, like a pinky bar friand (next time!!) Do your thing, live your dreams.

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