French Fridays With Dorie - Coconut Friands

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else. 

~ Leonardo da Vinci

Metaphorically speaking, I've been off the planet for two weeks and that's exactly the length of time you haven't seen a post from me. And I've been missing my French Fridays with Dorie crowd dearly so when I felt it was time to come back into the warmth of the blogging community, I almost always choose to cook along with the others in this virtual group. The other reason is of course, I don't have to think too hard to create my own recipe, as Dorie always provides one for us each week (well that's probably the main reason!).

This week's voted recipe is Coconut Friands, a French tea cake very similar to financiers except the nuts in the latter is replaced with unsweetened coconut. Normally I would have a bag of dried, shredded and unsweetened coconut lurking around in my baking arsenal but when I decided to bake these today, the bag had mysteriously disappeared. Either it had gone off somewhere on vacation and forgot to tell me, or Diva D had used it all up and yes, she forgot to tell me.

Funnily enough, this week I happened to make a coconut-flavored ice cream using macapuno, so I had a jar of that still lying around. And since a coconut by any other name is still a coconut, I thought, why not? Except I would have to play around a little with Dorie's recipe because macapuno, which literally means - oh my goodness - "mutant coconut", has a thick but soft gelatinous-like flesh that is used in popular Filipino sweets and ice cream.

The batter would not be as dry as when dried coconut is used, so to compensate for this, I increased the amount of flour and decreased the sugar (the macapuno strips were already preserved in a very sweet syrup, anyway). This probably lessened the browning of the batter during baking, resulting in slightly pale-looking, but no less delicious, friands.

As per Dorie's bonne idee to add a small piece of soft or candied fruit on top of each friand batter, I went ahead and added the striking, red-fleshed dragon fruit. I fashioned them into fetching little flowers using my fondant cutter, which by the way, I have never used to cut fondant with (but only because I haven't worked with fondant, well not yet). Producing these delicate flowers was probably the hardest part of this whole friand business, the rest of the mixing was so easy you can do it without any special equipment or technique.

I used a mini-muffin tin to bake them in, but I've seen others use a classic, oval-shaped friand mold or even a madeleine pan. The end result was pretty pleasing, with the macapuno ensuring that the friand remained on the coconut-ey side but softer to bite into rather than crunchy and grainy. And who can resist that pretty fuschia pink flower on top?

This recipe is contained in Dorie's award winning cookbook, Around My French Table. If you have a copy, why don't you join our fun cooking group? For other wonderful takes on this recipe, check out the other Doristas' posts here.

Have a delicious weekend ahead, everyone!