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

Cakes of Seasons Past

During the long blog silence between the posts we made last winter and the new posts written last week, Jenny and I were involved in many projects that we never wrote about here. I thought it might be nice to do a quick catch-up on a couple of my personal highlights.

Two for Two Cake and Cupcakes
My Godson's birthday is in April – which means somewhat unpredictable weather in San Diego. Ya, go ahead and mock me, "Oh, boo hoo! Is it not perfectly sunny and 75 degrees every day of the year?" Here's the thing though: the weather in April might be beautiful and perfect for a birthday party in the park…or it might be rainy with winds that will blow your streamers to smithereens! So what do you do? Plan for the park and hope for the best? Plan to have a bunch of kids running around your house with that extra excited energy that a rainy day incites? I think I know what I would choose. So, as you may have ascertained, my Godson's party was planned for a small group in the park, but ended up being rerouted into a dinner party of five adults and one birthday boy. In other words, I made way too much cake. Better too much than too little!

Chocolate cake and vanilla cupcakes - everybody wins!

The Dog Cake
My niece requested a dog cake for her 9th birthday and sent me some examples of cakes she liked. I was immediately intimidated because as much as I am game for trying, I'm not a cake sculptor. I didn't want to disappoint my niece,  so I set about trying to create an achievable dog cake design. I ended up basing my cake off a black and white Pokey Little Puppy cake design and I used the blue and white color scheme from one of the cake photos my niece sent to me. I made a test cake the weekend before, to make sure that I could pull it off and that I wouldn't have to place a emergency cake order. When I made the final cake the next weekend, it looked even better.

Fondant Galore

The kids seemed to like it, even if they found out the hard way that fondant is best enjoyed in small quantities.

Dog butt!

- Jenn

The Holly Hobbie Birthday Cake of Every Grown Man's Dreams

For a while I’ve been thinking that I need a go-to birthday cake recipe. The kind of recipe that you can count on to yield a perfect two-layer cake that you can fill and frost. You know the kind of cake I am talking about.

Note: roses do not occur in this color in nature.

With my husband’s birthday right around the corner, I figured it was time to begin my quest. I asked him what kind of birthday cake he wanted and he surprised me by replying, “I want the Holly Hobbie cake.” 

I should probably give a little Holly Hobbie cake background. This is the same cake that my mom made for my sixth (or fifth?) birthday party. It was a lot of work to decorate and so my mom has a bit of a love/hate memory of the experience. She is proud and remembers that it turned out really cute, but she also recalls that was over three hours of her life she can’t get back.

Naturally, I was up for the Holly Hobbie cake challenge. When I told Jenny about the plan, her immediate response was, “I’m in!” I bought a used 1975 Wilton Holly Hobbie pan and found the decorating instruction sheet online, and then started thinking about which cake recipe to bake. The Wilton instructions were useless in this department, as their helpful hint is to follow the instructions on the box. WTF, Wilton! Box cake? Maybe they recommend box cakes because they are guaranteed to bake up perfectly, and they know the home baker will be challenged to bake a proper cake in their shite character-shaped pans that are so thin you can nearly see through them. In the end, I chose this lemon cake recipe without the lemon filling: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/lemon-layer-cake-recipe/index.html.

The crumb and taste of the cake was excellent although the center of the cake didn’t rise up evenly. I’d like to blame the thin pan and my weird oven. Maybe I will. Luckily, it doesn’t matter because you have to turn the cake over to frost the bejesus out of it. We used a basic butter cream flavored with lemon.

The better-looking side

Finished! Now I need an arm massage.

Jenny and I followed the decorating instructions and piped our hearts out.  When I finally got the finishing touches completed, the end result was pretty good. (If I do say so myself!) Most importantly, my husband loved it and it tasted great. Also, I guess I have to give props to my mom for making this cake while she had two kids running around the house.

Looks like my next birthday cake will have to be one of those two-layer jobbies. 

- Jenn

Impromptu Birthday Cupcakes

Before the Christmas craziness kicked in, I made these cupcakes for my mom’s birthday. It was a spur-of-the-moment baking decision, so I did a quick search at  Epicurious for a white cupcake/cake recipe and got cracking. I used the Magnolia Bakery recipe, which I thought turned out some nice cupcakes, but I always wonder if my scratch cakes and cupcakes are too dry. I think it’s just due to the box cake world domination, but it might also be that I need to work on my cake skills. Either way, I’m still looking for that perfect recipe that will never fail me and that I can always count on.

My apologies for the terrible picture--it was late!

I had some grapefruit curd in the freezer, (thanks, Jenny!) so I filled half of the cupcakes with grapefruit curd and topped them with buttercream frosting. I knew chocolate was a must for my mom and cousin, so I added cocoa powder to the buttercream and voila: chocoholics were not neglected! Most of the birthday guests took seconds on these babies, so I don’t think cake dryness was too much of an issue.

In other birthday related news, Arigato the cat was rescued three years ago yesterday. Since we don’t know his actual birthday, we use this date to keep track of his years. Happy 3^rd birthday, Mr. Roboto!

He is thrilled

 - Jenn