It’s been a little while since my last baking post because, well, it’s been awhile since I’ve wanted to tackle some French pastry recipe’s. I love to bake but sometimes these recipe’s are so involved that I’m in the kitchen for hours. By the end of it I’m tired, cranky, and unappreciative of all my hard work. So, cracking open the Bouchon Bakery cookbook, I decided to skip around until I found a relatively easy recipe. I settled on the Financier.

First, let’s talk about this name. In the south we’d probably pronounce this the Finance-yer, but I think in French it’s a little fancier and is probably the Fee-nance-e-ay. I felt silly, even though I took french classes in high school, so I’ve settled on the a mix of the two, Fi-nance-e-er. Couldn’t tell you if that’s the proper way to pronounce this dish, but it’s the easiest! Or you can also call these cakes Petit Fours. We all know what those are.

Now, the Financier is one of the simpler recipe’s so I decided I’d make the original and the chocolate. I gathered my ingredients of flour, sugar, almond flour, eggs, butter and for the chocolate, cocoa powder.

I, of course, forgot to take pictures of the original batch, but here’s the dry ingredients as I’m sifting the cocoa powder into them.

The secret to the financier, is the brown butter ingredient. Now, since I didn’t not have linen on hand to separate my cooked ingredients, I browned my butter and added them into the dry ingredients, as noted in the recipe. In the original financier, the browned butter really brings out the nutty taste of the almond meal. In the chocolate recipe it adds to the cocoa and dark chocolate to make a very dark chocolate brownie-like taste. Both were rather good!

Before putting the batter in the pans I did use butter on the pans, and then froze them briefly. I think this is to help the cake come out of the pan easier. They did seem to pop out, so I think that’s a job well done!

The original financier is put into an individual brownie pan, and the chocolate financier into a mini muffin mold. I do not know if this is a traditional shape for each flavor, but since I did have the two pans, I did as the recipe suggested.

There was a note on the recipe about adding in nuts or fruit to the original financier and so I added a cut strawberry and a couple of pecan pieces. Looks pretty!

When they are done, you immediately take them out of the pan and let them cool on a rack. After eating one, I decided this was done to keep the edges crisp and the cake chewy. It’s a unique flavor, not really sweet at all. As I took my second bite of the original it tasted better than the first and by the time I finished I was a fan. The chocolate was a little more bitter than I like so I think I would add a little more sugar than the recipe calls for, but you know us Americans, we like our desserts sweet! The French have a much more delicate palate.

They were tastier than my pictures lead you to believe, promise!

I didn’t spend any additional dollars on the financier recipe as I had all of the ingredients on hand from past Bouchon recipe’s. Would I make these again? If I lived in England where afternoon tea was a thing, then yes. Here in Nashville? I’d take a cupcake over these financier’s any day, but I am glad for the experience of having made them.

This is the cookbook I’m using for my Bouchon Bakery baking extravaganza. It’s beautiful, so check it out sometime!

Deb