Hello!
As the weather has been so very perky, we have entered into fun salad territory, where heavy wintery meals are replaced by bright and exciting salads. I rely pretty much exclusively on Salads Are More Than Leaves by Elena Silcock for these. She just does salads right, and I plan to work my way through the majority of the book this year (having bought it towards the end of summer last year).
This week we had her Thai larb, which she tops with a toasted rice crunchy topper. As soon as I ate it I thought it absolutely had potential to go in something sweet. My brain normally runs 100 miles an hour when it comes to recipe development, and I sometimes struggle to pin down a single idea. Would it go in a tart? Maybe a toasted rice pudding, but is that too obvious? Maybe it should go in some biscuits, cookies even? This is just a snippet of the contents of my brain - sometimes cool, sometimes not so cool.
After a lot of back and forth, I decided it needed to be something pretty simple that would really show off the toasty, nutty flavour of the rice. The obvious pairing was brown butter, and so I landed on these little toasted rice financiers. I knew they had the potential to be good, but these are really great. The toasty rice, as it turns out, tastes just like popcorn, and they are so very easy to make (and they had the added bonus of clearing my freezer of egg whites). Recipe testing makes up a large portion of my work, and I rarely fancy sweet at the end of the day. So, when I keep going back to snack on something, I know it must be good - these little cakes definitely make the cut. They also make perfect gifts for your friends, if you haven’t already demolished them all.
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