Blackberry Friands

Method

Set your oven to 200°C and lightly butter 12 shallow bun tins.

Melt the butter in a small pan over a moderate heat, watching carefully until it becomes a dark nutty golden colour – don’t let it burn! Leave to cool a little.

Sieve the flour and sugar into a large mixing bowl then add the ground almonds. Stir in the lemon zest.

Beat the egg whites into a soft foam – they shouldn’t be able to stand up, then make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and pour in the egg whites together with the melted butter.

Mix everything together lightly but thoroughly and pour into the buttered tins. Roughly chop the blackberries and drop into the tins.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, remove from the oven and leave to settle for a little while before removing the cakes from the tins with a palette knife.

How are you getting along with those New Year resolutions, dear readers? I intend valiantly keeping to my rule for 2012, that is, not to waste a thing from the Whitsend kitchen.

There have been plenty of leftovers from the Christmas feasting to get this resolution off to a good start: jars of goose fat waiting in the fridge to roast potatoes for weeks to come, in the freezer sit large containers of wonderful stock made from the goose and turkey carcasses (with a bay leaf, onion and carrot added to the liquid for extra flavour), not to mention delicious memories of the best vegetable soup, made from the first quantity of this yummy stuff right after Christmas – a welcome antidote to all that meaty richness of the previous days. Cold turkey sandwiches with pickles and the last of the stuffing made certain that there wasn’t even any left over for a curry, though I think that pre-cooked meat doesn’t ever really absorb the flavours of curry spices as well as meat cooked in them from the start – but that’s another story.

I guess it’s been easy to keep to my resolution so far, but when I make my most ever successful little cakes, using 5 egg whites, I must remember to make my favourite custard recipe using 5 egg yolks on the same day and not forget they are in the fridge patiently awaiting my attention, only then to end up in a dismal scrambled egg mix a couple of days later, or even worse, to be totally forgotten for a couple of weeks! Mrs Trewhitless has great scope for improvement in her kitchen, I’m afraid.

In the meantime, let me pass on the afore-mentioned cake recipe, which I originally spotted in a newspaper article by Nigel Slater and which is hugely successful and popular every time, even for me!

Do any of you have tips for using up leftovers and avoiding waste in the kitchen? If so, please do share them with us all. Your ideas might seem obvious to you, but may well be new to many of us. Remember to send them to Mrs Trewhitless via the Whistler’s e-mail address. Looking forward to hearing from you, with best wishes for a very happy New Year

Now for the custard – not be eaten with the cakes, but to use up your egg yolks – it can be put into the freezer, which makes it extra useful.

Mrs Trewhitless