Home › Whites of Eggs › Almond and Rice Cakes
Almond and Rice Cakes
2 ounces ground almonds 2 ounces butter 2 ounces sugar 4 ounces ground rice 2 whites of egg Beat the butter to a cream; add the sugar and almonds; then sprinkle in the rice, beating it all the time. Whip the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, and mix all together. Drop about a teaspoonful on a well greased baking tin, either flat or shallow, and bake in a quick oven for five or ten minutes.
A small English drop biscuit built on weight, not volume, and stiffened with rice flour rather than wheat. The whole thing hinges on how coarse your ground rice is and how briefly the cakes stay in the oven.
- The weights, converted2 oz ground almonds is about 1/2 cup almond flour; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons; 2 oz sugar is a generous 1/4 cup; 4 oz ground rice is about 3/4 cup. Two egg whites from modern large eggs come to roughly 2 1/4 fluid ounces, which is close enough to the original intent.
- Ground riceNot ground cooked rice and not the fine powder sold as rice starch. Ground rice is rice milled to a slightly gritty flour, coarser than cornstarch and finer than semolina; Asian-grocery rice flour is the nearest match, and it gives the sandy bite these cakes are meant to have.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat teaspoon-sized drops colour at the edges well within the five-to-ten-minute window given. Watch them from minute five; almond flour scorches quickly.
- No leavening at allThe whipped whites are the only lift, so fold them in rather than beating them down. The mixture stays stiff and does not spread much, meaning the cakes come out of the oven much the shape you dropped them.
- Beat in the rice graduallyThe instruction to sprinkle the rice in while beating is doing real work. Dumped in at once it clumps into gritty pockets that never hydrate, and the cakes bake with hard specks through them.
- Greasing the tinButter a sheet generously or line it with parchment; these are sugary and eggy enough to weld themselves to bare metal.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on how generously you drop them; teaspoon-sized drops from this quantity will give several dozen. They crisp as they cool, and the almond flavour is best in the first day or two.
Recipes of this kind made use of leftover whites: custards, mayonnaise, and enriched sauces consumed yolks, and a cook was left with a bowl of whites that had to be spent on something. Ground rice was cheap, kept well, and needed no wheat, while a few ounces of ground almonds gave a plain biscuit the character of a more expensive one. The result happens to contain no wheat flour, which was incidental at the time and is the reason recipes like this get rediscovered now. Cakes of this shape, dropped by the spoonful and baked hot and fast, belong to the same family as the ratafia and macaroon biscuits sold by confectioners.