Cake with a Colorless Crust: Raspberry and White Chocolate Financier Traybake

After making a double batch of Marcel Desaulnier's wonderful White Chocolate Patty Cake for a birthday party, I had a lot of egg whites left over and decided to use them in a Raspberry and White Chocolate Financier Traybake recipe from BBC Good Food. 
 
I combined golden granulated sugar with flour, almond flour, and cinnamon; folded in egg whites that I had beaten to soft peaks; and gradually incorporated cooled browned butter. I poured the batter into a parchment-lined pan (I used a 9-inch by 13-inch pan, instead of the 8-inch by 12-inch pan specified), scattered on fresh raspberries and Callebaut Gold caramelized white chocolate callets, and put the cake in the oven to bake.
When the baking time was up, I pulled the pan out of the oven and the cake was firm to the touch. But it did not look cooked at all. The top of the cake was spotted with small air holes and completely pale, save for a pencil-thin border of light golden cake around the edges. As you can see in the photo above, the interior of the cake is the exact same color as the top crust, which is just weird. The cake did not look very appetizing and I wasn't sure if something had gone terribly wrong.
 
But I went ahead to cool and slice the bars and they tasted so much better than they looked. The sponge cake was tender and buttery, and the white chocolate added rich, milky caramel flavor. But the best part was definitely the raspberries, which added pops of tart, intense flavor. I stored the bars in the fridge because of the berries and they held up well for a few days. 

The scientific alchemy that helps turn raw batter into tasty finished baked goods is the Maillard reaction, which is responsible not only for browning, but also the development of many desirable flavors and aromas. I don't know why the Maillard reaction seemed to go AWOL while these bars were baking, but the reaction is also responsible for the changes in color and flavor that occur when you brown butter -- so it didn't forsake me completely. While I enjoyed eating these bars and thought they tasted terrific, I found their pale appearance so unsettling that I can't see myself making them again.

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