Yesterday with My Children We Made......Financiers Orange Chocolat

Financiers are one of my husband's favorite petits gâteaux. For the longest time, he was subscribing to a French cooking magazine, mouthwatering in front of recipes to make, hoping to learn more about wines... but dreaming really!
I get really frustrated with cooking magazines. I like reading them but inevitably the day I am looking for a recipe, I never know in which issue it was... so I waste time reading through piles of magazines and reading more recipes that I should make one day... but often failing to find the recipe I had intended to make in the first place. We tried to flag the recipes we liked but, once again, it was not a very efficient process. At some point, we decided to tear the magazines to only keep the recipes we really liked and would be making one day. We recycled old binders from my husband's old time in veterinary school to file our recipes but failed to print new labels. So, just to give you an idea: under the old label "Les mollusques : la moule, l'escargot, la seiche", we have savory tarts recipes! It works as our system but I can't imagine what people would think if they were to read the labels first!


The problem we ran into while selecting recipes was that we did not necessarily agree on what recipes to keep : he wanted the bacon-and-cheese-loaded-beef-whatever while I wanted the shrimp-lemon-zucchinis-whatever. To avoid major useless conflicts, we decided we could not veto any recipe chosen by the other one. In a way, I was winning because I knew that out of the many recipes he selected (and that would not have made my pile), he was not going to make 10% of them. And time proved me right!

We both liked the Financiers recipe. The original recipe called for fresh mint and tea but I tried it and the result was really disappointing: no mint flavor (despite mint extract), cooked fresh mint was not adding anything but green color to the financiers. Franchement décevant! I therefore changed the recipe to end up with this one, which I have been making regularly (not often enough according to my husband...). I make them whenever I have egg whites leftover from another recipe. The financiers are really easy to make and cook very fast. It's a perfect recipe to make with children if you are looking for something different from old-plain cookies. Bon Appétit!

Ingredients: (for about 8 financiers)
- 1.05 oz (30 gr) butter + some for the molds
- 3 egg whites
- 2.6 oz (75 gr) Almond meal/flour
- 2.6 oz (75 gr) confectioned sugar
- 1.05 oz (30 gr) all purpose flour
- 1 Tb (15ml)  Orange Flower Extract (optional)
- 1 small orange zested (and juiced)
- Bittersweet chocolate chips

• Pre-heat oven to 400 F (200 C)
• In small pot, melt butter and let it brown (making beurre noisette). Reserve
• In a bowl, mix in the almond flour, the sugar and the flour
• Whisk in egg whites in the dry mixture
• Add the orange juice and Orange Flower extract (or orange juice)
• Stir in the butter and chocolate chips
• Butter the molds and divide the dough into the molds
• Cook in the oven for 15 minutes. 
• Cool them down on a rack.

My Personal Comments:

• If you don't have Orange Flower extract, use the juice of the orange
• Don't worry about the shape of your molds; I often make them in tea-cakes or muffins molds