A friand is a small almond cake, popular in Australia and

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

, closely related to the French

financier An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital most of the time the investor purchases some species of property. Type ...

. The principal ingredients are

almond flour Almond meal, almond flour or ground almond is made from ground sweet almonds. Almond flour is usually made with blanched almonds (no skin), whereas almond meal can be made with whole or blanched almonds. The consistency is more like corn meal th ...

, egg whites,

butter Butter is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream. It is a semi-solid emulsion at room temperature, consisting of approximately 80% butterfat. It is used at room temperature as a spread, melted as a condimen ...

, and

powdered sugar Powdered sugar, also called confectioners' sugar, or icing sugar, is a finely ground sugar produced by milling granulated sugar into a powdered state. It usually contains between 2% and 5% of an anti-caking agent – such as corn starch, p ...

. A friand typically has additional flavorings such as coconut,

chocolate Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods. Cacao has been consumed in some form since at least the Olmec civ ...

fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants (also known as angiosperms) disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in particu ...

, and nuts. It is baked in small moulds, typically oval or barquette in shape. French financiers do not have additional flavorings. In French, a ''friand'', which literally means 'a tasty thing', generally refers to sausage, cheese, herbs or other stuffing baked in

puff pastry Puff pastry, also known as ', is a flaky light pastry made from a laminated dough composed of dough (') and butter or other solid fat ('). The butter is put inside the dough (or vice versa), making a ' that is repeatedly folded and rolled out befo ...

.Prosper Montagné and Charlotte Snyder Turgeon, ''The New Larousse Gastronomique: The Encyclopedia of Food, Wine & Cookery'' (Crown Publishers, 1997), 831 The word is not generally used to refer to an almond cake. See the wiktionary entry for ''friand''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Friand Cakes French pastries Australian desserts New Zealand desserts Almond desserts