Make Way for Mignons

I meant to post about the new addition to my recipe book collection earlier, but a friend of mine forced me down to watch RWBY, and well…that was an addiction waiting to happen.

In any case, I got this in the mail the other day:

My friend has become doubly awesome because of this. And since my sister graduated on Friday, I figured the weekend would be a good time to try one of these recipes out. So I chose one of the non-chocolate ones (I know, I know, why not chocolate?! I think it had to do with the weather mostly. I wanted something light and fruity, not so much chocolatey).

MIGNONS

I think the name owes itself to how small these cakes come out as once I was done with baking them. It was also weird that the recipe doesn’t actually call for any rising agent like baking powder and baking soda, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to rise. I’ve also never tried making sponge cake, or at least, the book’s version of sponge cake.

It wasn’t too hard to follow the recipe, but I made a few changes of my own out of preference and the fact that I knew my friend had balked over the egg-white glaze (somehow her discovery of raw egg whites being used on certain icings had freaked her out…oops XD).

Ingredients

Dough:

5 eggs
1 lemon (juice and zest)
6 tbsp white sugar
5 tbsp flour

Cream:

Raspberry jam

Glaze:

2 tbsp butter, melted
1 lemon (juice and zest)
1 cup powdered/confectioner’s sugar

Instructions

For the Cake: The instructions were also pretty easy to follow. The cake itself is just a mixture of the four ingredients. It was specified that the egg whites and yolk should be separated, so I beat the egg whites in first with the lemon juice and sugar. When it was frothy and mixed, I added the egg yolks in and stirred, then added the flour in. I’m not a lemon zest person, so I didn’t add any (and I was a little sorry I ran out of lemon extract, but that’s okay). If you like lemon zest, I suggest adding a bit of it into the cake for that lemon-zing kick and texture.

Preheat the oven 350 degrees F. Put the cake on a flat tray and bake it until “golden brown”. I would say 30-40 minutes. I constantly checked in case I burned it.

For the Cream: The mignons recipe in the book was a little more complicated, and it used an apple sauce filling instead. Since my friend is allergic to apple (SADNESS), I decided that raspberry might be the way to go. What I did was microwave raspberry jam to a more liquid consistency (I’d say 15-second intervals).

For the Glaze: I used a standard glaze recipe, not one where raw egg whites were involved. Just mix the butter, lemon juice, and confectioner’s sugar until it’s smooth and creamy.

Once the cake was done, I’d realized how thin it was (owing to the fact that I didn’t have any smaller cake trays), so I halved it, put the jam (which should have solidified a bit) on one, and then placed the cut half on top. Then I just went ahead and cut them into squares. The glaze was spread on top a bit, though admittedly I’d refused to put too much on because the sponge cake itself was really good and technically didn’t need the extra sweetness.