Akuma no Financier®: Five Years of Persistence in One Small Cake
This is the story of why I became so determined to make a better financier.
First, a Little History
The story begins in seventeenth-century France, with a cake called a visitandine made in convents. It was a simple almond cake without egg yolks, usually round or oval, and is said to have provided protein during periods when meat was not eaten.
The form now known as the financier is associated with a pastry chef named Lasne, whose shop stood near the Paris stock exchange. Understanding the needs of the busy people working in finance, he made a thin rectangular cake resembling a gold ingot.
The shape suggested good fortune, while the cake was robust enough to carry in a pocket without crumbling or soiling a suit. A firm, crisp exterior and a moist interior helped keep crumbs from falling.
Generous quantities of browned butter and ground almonds, with only a little flour, produced a rich cake that also kept well. To me, the fact that it has been loved for more than a century speaks to its essential appeal: it was delicious, easy to eat, easy to give and easy for people to welcome into their lives.
Yet until I became chef of l’art et la manière in 2015, I had encountered very few financiers that I thought were truly good. In fact, I did not particularly like them. The ones I knew from seasonal gift boxes were damp and lacked the aroma of butter. That was what I had come to expect from a financier.
A Turning Point
The turning point came in a conversation with a pastry chef. I asked how financiers were made. He replied, “They’re a way of using up egg whites.”
Pastry kitchens can have large quantities of leftover whites, and the idea of financiers as a way to use them was well established. At that moment, something became clear to me: perhaps starting with what needed to be used up was part of the reason the cakes I knew had disappointed me.
Respect for the Past, and the Resolve to Go Further
This was a wonderful cake that earlier generations had preserved for more than a hundred years. With such advances in equipment and technique, why should we not make something even more delicious?
I felt the answer lay in how seriously we approached it. I decided to respect that inheritance by pursuing a better result and carrying it forward.
I began researching financiers around 2015 and started developing them in earnest in 2016. Over the following five years, I made thousands of trials.
Five Years of Trial and Error
I kept asking myself what a delicious financier should be. My answer was simple: a clear aroma of butter, plenty of butter in the cake, and the fragrance of good almonds.
I set aside the idea of using up egg whites and worked from the opposite direction. I used as little egg white as I could and as much butter and ground almond as the structure would allow. Again and again, I tested the boundary at which the cake would just hold together.
There were many failures. I tried every kind of butter I could, and many ground almonds, sugars, flours and salts. I explored ingredients from France, Japan, the United States, Italy, Spain and Turkey—anything I thought might be right.
The aim was not to reduce costs or make mass production easier. I was searching for the best result I could achieve.
The Ingredients Led Me to an Answer
As I continued, the ingredients themselves suggested the answer. I settled on French butter and Spanish ground almonds. Even the very small quantity of flour made a surprising difference when I used French flour. The little salt in the recipe also tasted distinctly different when it came from France.
For this particular French cake, the ingredients of France proved essential to the result I wanted. That might sound obvious, but it was something I only understood by working through the alternatives in detail.
There are things you discover only by paying close attention to ingredients and choosing each one carefully.
Akuma no Financier® — The Devil’s Financier
The result of those five years was Akuma no Financier®, whose name translates as “the Devil’s Financier”. The registered name expresses the almost irresistible pleasure I wanted a single bite to offer.
The rich aroma of butter, the depth of almond flavour, a crisp outside and a moist centre: I wanted to preserve the qualities earlier generations loved, then refine them through modern technique and carefully chosen ingredients.
For me, this cake represents respect for more than a century of history and five years of persistence. It embodies what I believe in as a chef.