The Lancaster tart I made yesterday used up a bunch of the leftover lemon curd I had stashed in the fridge, but left me with even more extraneous egg whites. I already had three left over from last weekend's baking exploits and the tart produced two more! I considered making an angel food cake, but in the end decided to flip through Edmonds since I know there are a few recipes in there that make use of egg whites. I love angel food cake, but I wanted to try something I hadn't done before.

Edmonds has a recipe for friands that calls for five egg whites -- perfect! -- plus a bunch of ground almonds and lemon zest and I kind of liked the idea of sticking with lemon-almond theme this weekend. If you're not on a lemon kick, the lemon zest can be swapped out for vanilla extract. Different flavour, but just as tasty.

These little almond cakes were apparently originally baked in small rectangular tins. Muffin tins work just fine if you don't have anything like that though.

Friands

Slightly adapted from Edmonds Cookery Book

Ingredients

• 1/3 c. soft (plain/standard/pastry) flour
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 c. icing (powdered/confectioners') sugar
• 1 1/2 c. ground almonds
• 1/4 tsp. coarse sea salt¹, ground
• 5 egg whites
• 170g unsalted butter, melted
• 2 tsp. lemon zest or 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• sliced almonds, to decorate

Directions

1. Grease and flour a friand or muffin tin and preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).
2. Sift together flour, baking powder, and icing sugar.
3. Add ground almonds and salt and mix well, preferably with your fingers, breaking up any lumps.
4. In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until frothy and foamy all the way through, but not yet stiff.
5. Gently fold egg whites into dry ingredients.
6. Mix in butter and lemon zest/vanilla extract.
7. Spoon batter into prepared tin and decorate tops with almond slices.
8. Bake at 180°C (350°F) for 20 minutes.
9. Remove from tin and place on wire rack to cool.

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Variations

Gluten-Free

This recipe is pretty ideal for conversion to gluten-free baking as it only using a very small amount of flour to begin with and the flour it does use is low-protein/gluten. The recipe as published in Edmonds actually calls for gluten free flour. I just used regular soft/pastry flour as that's what I had on hand and no one in this household is actually gluten-intolerant. Swapping the gluten-free flour back in again makes for an easy gluten-free treat.

Ingredients

• 1/3 c. gluten-free plain or all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 c. icing (powdered/confectioners') sugar
• 1 1/2 c. ground almonds
• 1/4 tsp. coarse sea salt¹, ground
• 5 egg whites
• 170g unsalted butter, melted
• 2 tsp. lemon zest or 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• sliced almonds, to decorate

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¹ The original recipe doesn't call for any salt, but also doesn't specify unsalted butter. The default in NZ is generally understood to be salted butter. Since I was using unsalted butter, I added a small amount of salt to compensate. ^Back