Tangerine Pound Cake Petits Fours With Marzipan Peonies: Lessons Learned

Petits fours are not for the faint-hearted.  Like their come-hither distant cousin the macaron, the petit four bats her smooth-glazed eyelashes at you and, the next thing you know you are elbow deep in warm poured fondant and your own tears. That is, if you let them defeat you.  But you shouldn’t – they are extremely rewarding to make once you master some of the details.  It was really a pleasure to be able to put my heart and soul into these pretty little cakes for my cousin’s wedding this last spring.

The entire dessert display

Glamour shot just before delivery

I learned many important lessons during this project, so I thought I would share some of them here with you.  I highly recommend taking the time to do a practice batch of petits fours in advance if you are planning to bring some to a special event.  It takes the edge off when you can make some errors to learn (and eat) from along the way.

1. Choose your cake recipe wisely – it will need to be fairly sturdy in order to hold up to the slicing, filling, dipping etc. I recommend a nice, moist pound cake. (Be sure it is a tasty cake – you don’t want to put all this effort into making something that looks pretty but tastes mediocre. That’s just sad.)
2. Covering the top of your cake with marzipan or rolled fondant before cutting it into pieces will yield nice smooth tops after glazing/dipping.
3. If you are married to an engineer/architect who is patient and supportive enough to help you measure out and cut exact grid of petits fours from four seperate nine-inch square cakes, you are a lucky lady indeed.
4. Once your cake is filled and or covered and cut into petite bites, wrap them well and freeze them for at least four hours or overnight. This makes for stronger cake when it comes time to glaze.
5. When making your poured fondant, DO NOT let the temperature go over 110 F.  (Thanks, Andrea!) Once the sugar has been heated past that point, you cannot save your fondant and you will end up with gloppy, thick, ugly petits fours.  You have to dump the whole batch and start over. 
   
6. You can keep your poured fondant warm using a double boiler, and you can also add teaspoons of boiling water to keep the temperature and consistency good. (If using this method, you need to be sure that you don’t over dilute your fondant and end up with too much variation in the appearance of your final product.)
7. Have a plan for the final decoration up front, if possible.  I crafted one hundred coral-colored marzipan peonies a few days in advance so that I would be ready to place them on top when the dipped petits fours were just dry enough to be sticky. 
   
8. Be patient. You got this.

Bonus tip: when coloring and working with sticky marzipan, sterile medical gloves are your new best friends. 

Don't let this happen to you. Watch that poured fondant temperature!

“Hey – what’s up with that weird 'S' after petits in petits fours?”

Just like the proper French word for everyone’s favorite almond + meringue sandwich cookie is macaron (not macaroon), the proper French words for these little bite-sized morsels are petits fours. The adjective in French must agree in both gender and number, and because the fours are plural, the 'S' is added onto petit. As for why these pretty little cakes are considered masculine, I couldn’t say . . . We have adopted the words into the English language at this point, and I think you will find them called petit fours in places online and elsewhere, so I wouldn’t clutch my pearls if I saw them written out that way.  I just prefer going with the original name. 

- Jenn