Review of Original Butter Financier, Earl Grey Financier and Pie d'Amandes (Almond Pie Pastry) by Butter Butler, Tokyo

This review is one of the few negative ones I am writing, because the name of the brand and product was the biggest misnomer ever, so I felt a strong need to warn people to stay away or at least be aware. It is a brand called Butter Butler, and the pastries were purchased from a store in Tokyo, Japan. Their main products are these supposedly butter financiers, along with other French pastries.

At first glance, the products, packaging (images below) and brand name seem like they would make for great souvenirs. However, I was in for a huge disappointment.

The most important PSA is that it contains more margarine than butter! And while the margarine does have a bit of butter, vegetable oil is listed as the first ingredient, and it also has unspecified other ingredients just listed as "others". (Check out the ingredients list below.) They do use some cultured butter, which is respectable, but using margarine while branding your product and shop as a butter specialist feels extremely misleading to me. 

Furthermore, there were so many fake ingredients in the list. All of these caused the taste and texture to suffer tremendously, as I explain below. I even reheated the financiers to get a better texture, but the perfect texture couldn't make up for the fakeness and artificial feeling.

This is clearly seen in how there are long queues at top tier (but similarly priced) patisseries such as Gateau Festa Harada or Noix de Beurre. But Butter Butler's store was virtually empty besides us (image below).

In the almond pastry pie ingredients list (below), however, I did find something good and very interesting. And it had fewer fake or weird ingredients. There's a chance that it was more freshly baked due to its different, non-airtight packaging of paper sleeves sealed with a sticker, as opposed to the airtight plastic and individually pre-packaged financiers, so if you want to purchase anything, try to prioritise those products that are not in airtight packages and look freshly baked.

Original Butter Financier

Despite this being their signature item, it was actually the worst product of the lot. 

First of all, the taste was terrible. It tasted more like a fake cheese flavour, like nachos or those commercial cheddar cheeses. I wonder if it is due to them adding lactose, dextrin and mizuame (all very strange ingredients to be adding to a French pastry). 

The part that killed it was this terribly industrial aftertaste. It tasted almost like cardboard or crayons at the end. I wondered if the oil was rancid, but it was well within the best before date, and the fake smell was also quite strong when I reheated it in the oven, so I believe it's probably due to the oils and other additives they used.

I liked that they added a bit of maple syrup, but it was just lost under all the terrible tastes.

The texture was a nice cookie-like crunch due to the reheating, especially on the bottom (see image below - the texture looks like a kind of cookie crust found coating melonpans, the Japanese bread with a cookie crust), but the margarine left a very waxy feathery mouthfeel that lasted long after I had consumed it. Overall, it was just a horrible experience for me.

This is the ingredients list (click to enlarge), and I'm translating them to the best of my ability, but do run them through google translate yourself if you would like to be certain. In order, it reads: sugar, egg, margarine (vegetable oil, cultured butter, others), almond powder, wheat flour, mix flour (wheat flour, sugar), cultured butter, maple syrup, mizuame, dextrin, milk sugar (I assume it is lactose), salt, components of milk proteins separated by water (whey perhaps?), derivatives of milk/expansion agent (raising agent?), emulsifier, flavouring, caramel colouring, anti-oxidation agent (V.E), (some statement on allergens I believe, which includes wheat, egg, dairy components, almond, bean). 

Butter and Earl Grey Financier

This one was somewhat salvageable. Visually, the flakes of tea leaves give it a very nice appearance.

There was a very nice and fragrant tea flavour, with very intense Ceylon tea notes. It covered up the weird industrial taste significantly, but not completely.

The weird cheesy taste was not obvious, but it didn't taste buttery either.

If you have to try this brand's financiers no matter what, this is the safest bet.

The ingredients list is in the same image above, and it is mostly the same, except that there is "black tea paste" before maple syrup, and "black tea leaves" before dextrin.

Pie d'Amandes (Almond Pie Pastry)

This is an interesting type of pastry that is relatively common in Japan, but I couldn't find any traditional French pastry that is named exactly this, so I am guessing that it is an innovation among the patisseries in Japan. It seems to be a pie pastry coated with an almond marzipan cookie crust, like the frangipane crust on traditional almond croissants.

It had a nice fragrant almond flavour, but I suspect margarine was used once again or perhaps shortening (although it doesn't appear in the ingredients list below), because the pastry flavour was quite fake and commercialised, like the margarine or shortening-based biscuit snacks sold in convenience stores (think of the Glico Pocky biscuit flavour). So the margarine really undid the nice almond-marzipan taste.

The texture was like a normal cookie or frangipane crust. I couldn't notice the any difference between the pie pastry and the frangipane.

The ingredients list is below (click to enlarge). It is not even complete, and just lists the first ingredient as "pie (wheat flour, butter, others)". I suspect there was some shortening or margarine tucked under "others". It did not have dextrin or lactose, but it had this other weird ingredient called "flavoured syrup" (whatever that is). It also had vegetable oil.

Nonetheless, over all it seemed to have purer ingredients and fewer additives than the financiers. From the non-airtight packaging, it might have been freshly baked, so perhaps that's the reason.

2 super interesting ingredients that I thought were brilliant, however, were "candied apple" and "apple puree". I never noticed it in the taste, but I think these ingredients made the almond fragrance pop with hints of floral notes. It is also the first time I saw it on an ingredients list for an almond product, so this is one praiseworthy point.

Better recommendations

I highly recommend that you avoid this brand altogether, as there are much better alternatives in Tokyo or Japan, with long queues frequently seen at the top 3 of this list:

1. One top notch brand available in Tokyo that bakes my current favourite financiers is Noix de Beurre.
2. If you're in Osaka, you should try Chihiro Sweets Shop for my second-favourite financiers.
3. If you love rusk and other great French pastries, Gateau Festa Harada is for you.
4. If you like Japanese sweet potato pastries, try Imokawa.
5. If you are a fan of pistachio and are not picky about the pastry or butter, try Pista & Tokyo.

Here's an image of Butter Butler's deserted store in a central Tokyo department store. (I believe it was the Mitsukoshi outlet.)

Finally, these are some extra images of the packaging.

Financier Packaging

Almond Pie Pastry Packaging

Discover other better pastries in Japan

• Brown Cultured Butter Financier, (Candied) Orange Financier and other premium gourmet French bakes by Noix de Beurre
• Chihiro Sweets Shop
  Cultured Butter, Hazelnut and Earl Grey financiers
  Part 2 - Pistachio and Dark Chocolate financiers
• Gateau Festa Harada
  Ruskology 101 - Original Butter Rusk and Hors d'oeuvre Rusk Sommelier by Gateau Festa Harada
  Leaf Pie
  Tigresse (almond powder cake with chocolate ganache)
  Maple Financier
• Annou Satsumaimo Sweet Potato "Oimo Financier" by Imokawa and Minamimachi Coffee, Tokyo
• Japanese Yellow Sweet Potato Paste Snacks by Specialists: Wakasayahonpo's Potato House and Unagiimo