Florentines

A little while back, I picked up a copy of the "Cakes and Pastries" volume of the Good Housekeeping step-by-step cookery series, published in 1984. It's delightfully dated, in rather a charming way. I fancied baking something super simple today, so I thought I'd give something from it a go! The flavourings were somewhat 

Florentines

Ingredients

• 90g Butter
• 100g Granulated sugar
• 100g Flaked almonds
• 25g Mixed peel
• 25g Mixed dried fruit*
• 1tbsp Milk
• 100g Plain chocolate

*This was rather dried fruit heavy, as this was what was left from the time that I'd run out of raisins and pilfered them out of this bag

Method

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the sugar, then boil for one minute.
2. Remove from the heat and stir in the almonds, mixed peel, mixed dried fruit and milk.
3. Drop into heaps onto lined trays and bake at 180C for 10-15 mins until golden brown.
4. Remove from oven and press around the edge of each biscuit with a knife to neated the shape.
5. Allow to cool on the baking sheets.
6. Melt chocolate and spread over the top.**
7. Allow to cool fully on paper towels.

**This is not quite what the recipe calls for - it actually calls for 175g of plain chocolate, which you're supposed to spread on the base of the set biscuits and then make patterns in with forks. Having got to this stage, some of the florentines were looking decidedly crumbly (I suspect that my scales were playing up and I think I added too much almond), and I didn't expect that they'd have enough structural integrity to allow me to pick them up, let alone to spread chocolate on their bases. So I figured this would be a reasonable compromise, and that the chocolate might help hold them together once set. In hindsight, I might have been a bit overly concerned, and actually it might well have been fine.

Here they are just about to go into the oven.

Straight out of the oven.

And after adding chocolate. I thought it'd be interesting to try some without the chocolate, and also it saved me from opening another bar...

I probably should have guessed from the recipe, but these are just about the greasiest things that I've ever baked. They're basically deep-fried flaked almonds; absolutely delicious in small quantities, but you really wouldn't want to eat a lot! I'm not sure whether I prefer the chocolate covered ones or the plain ones though - they each have their own charm. Overall, they're pretty nice, but I'm not sure that they're that high up on my list, and I doubt I'll bother making them again.