I love cherry season! Actually, I love all stone fruit and consider it one of the best things about summer. These friands are full of juicy, fresh summer cherries and even the icing sugar is black cherry flavoured. Not a necessary ingredient, you can easily make this with regular icing sugar, but well worth using. I love to try out new ingredients (despite my kitchen not being big enough for my enthusiasm)!

I have a cherry stoner (as I am also enthusiastic about gadgets) and this does make pitting the cherries a little easier, but if the cherries are nice and ripe, the stones should come out fairly easily by just halving them and removing the stones that way.

Ingredients:
250ml egg whites – I used Two Chicks pasteurised egg whites
250g icing sugar – I used Sugar and Crumbs Black cherry flavour that I got from The Vanilla Valley
230g Cherries – pitted and halved
165g butter – melted plus extra for buttering the pan
130g Ground almonds
100g plain/all-purpose flour
Lemon zest from one small lemon
Small handful of slivered almonds

To decorate:
Black cherry flavoured icing sugar mixed with little water to make a glaze for drizzling

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180°C and brush the friand pan with melted butter (if anyone knows where to get friand/oval paper cases, please let me know!)

In a large bowl, mix the flour, ground almonds and icing sugar together and mix together.

Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (or using a hand mixer), beat the egg whites until slightly frothy/broken down and add in the melted butter until well mixed.

Fold in the dry ingredients and finally, stir in the cherries gently so as not to break them up (mine were super juicy).

Divide the batter between the holes and scatter over a few slivered almonds.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 25-30 minutes. The little cakes should be golden brown and a toothpick should come out clean when inserted into one.

Leave to stand for at least 10 minutes as they are very fragile when just baked. The cherries are quite moist, so it’s best to leave everything to cool and firm up before attempting to turn them out or you risk leaving half the cake behind!

Gently turn out onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely.

Mix a few tablespoons of the black cherry icing sugar (or normal icing sugar) with a teaspoon or two of water to make a simple glaze. Drizzle back and forth over the friands and leave to set.

These were the most popular friands I have made to date and the black cherry icing sugar is really worth using as it makes the cakes extra special.