Frogging & Friands

How can this be? I actually have time to myself in the middle of the day! Niamh is sleeping (she has unfortunately caught the Cold that begat the Croup, thanks to small-boy-kisses). Finn, who is much, much better, is reading in his bedroom – occasionally calling out to find out what P-R-O-B-E spells, or A-M-A-L-G-A-M! (After the first, I was puzzled, after the second I figured out he was reading ‘Emma goes to the dentist’).

So anyway, I’m frogging. Well, before I was blogging, I was frogging. I decided (after you all said I should 🙂 ) to stick with the ‘Fantasy Blues’ border on ‘You Were Hatched’, but I’m definitely ditching the metallic backstitching it calls for – that just looks right out of place to me, so I’ll just backstitch the border and eyes with dark blue floss instead. Sometime this weekend (I hope), I’ll be posting a happy dance.

When Niamh wakes up, we’re off to buy flour to make playdough. And more friands. Let me tell you about friands. They are the Best. Things. Ever! Even for my baking-challenged self, these are fail proof. They are 100% delicious, if not more. Here’s the recipe I found on the back of my icing sugar packet – we have since experimented with Raspberry friands from another recipe, but I liked these ones the best. I might try lime zest in today’s batch though. Yum.

I’m too lazy to imperialize the measurements – and besides, Metric rulz! :giggle:

Orange Almond Friands
150g butter
100g almond meal
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/3 cup plain flour, sifted
5 egg whites
grated rind of 2 oranges

Preheat oven to 200°C. Lightly grease 12 (1/3 cup capacity) muffin pans*.
Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes until very hot. Remove from heat, cool for five minutes.
Combine almond meal, icing mix and flour in a large bowl. Add lightly beaten egg whites and orange rind and mix gently to combine. Stir in melted butter.
Pour mixture evenly into prepared pans so they are two thirds full. Bake 20-25 minutes or until golden and firm to touch.
Serve warm or cold.

*If you want to be a cool kid, you can buy friand pans – café friands are usually oval in shape. But muffin pans work just fine, truly.

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