Little Ovens*

*According to Google Translate, “petit-four” is French for “little oven”.

I’d say “petit-fours are hard”, but I’d wager that they’re easier the second time around. When I made them, it wasn’t just my first time with petit-fours, but it was also my first time making and using fondant icing, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a tricky process. However, I didn’t burn the house down and I’d like to think I at least get a merit badge for that.

Here’s how it went:

I baked the cake for 27 minutes, just like the recipe said, and it came out PERFECT. I mean, PERFECT. I fork-stabbed the cake many times in disbelief, it was so freaking perfect.

The next step was to freeze it. The directions said to thaw it for fifteen minutes once it comes out of the freezer. I interpreted this as “let it thaw while I run an errand”, which ended up taking more than fifteen minutes. There weren’t a lot of crumbs when I finally got around to cutting out the shapes, but there were enough crumbs for it to be slightly annoying. If I were to do it again, I’d skip the errand, set a timer, and stare unblinkingly at the cake for the whole fifteen minutes. Except maybe the staring part. The staring would neither help not hurt the thawing process whatsoever, and hurt my eyeballs.

In the interest of making the proceeding process less annoying, I put the cut-out cakes in the freezer and washed some of the prep dishes to give them time to reconstitute. Everything turned out okay. I know you were on the edge of your seat wondering if it would. Making petit-fours is comparable to Mission Impossible in its suspense if Mission Impossible were a sock puppet show with no special effects budget.

btw, there’s a spot of pink dye in the cake,
that’s not the original cake color.

Rewinding to before the cake went in the oven: the recipe advised smoothing the batter in the pan to make the cake come out evenly. I thought I did this. Maybe I was hallucinating that part. Maybe there was a Mission Impossible sock puppet show on TV and I couldn’t peel my eyes away, thereby neglecting to smooth the batter. Whatever happened, the cake didn’t rise all Martha-Stewart evenly and as a result, the cutout-cakes were different heights. This meant I had a fun little forest of cakes of various sizes on my counter. Therefore, I would advise NOT smoothing out the batter.

I also decided to not cut the top off the cake. The recipe thought it was a good idea, but what was I going to do with the cake-shavings when I was done? I couldn’t tell what difference it would make if they were going to be covered in icing.

Speaking of weirdly shaped scraps, some were weirdly shaped scraps were produced in the initial cake-cutting. They were big enough that I thought I could cut them into layers and dab jam between them like the rest of the cakes. That idea didn’t turn out so great.

Weirdly shaped ones not pictured.

It didn’t turn out so great because once the fondant-icing is applied, the petit-fours have to harden on a wire rack. The wires in my rack weren’t wide enough to accommodate the weirdly-shaped pieces so they had to harden on parchment paper. When the icing did finally harden, the scraps adhered, and I ended up with little parchment-paper flecks on the bottom of those petit-fours. Not so great. I’d recommend just eating your weirdly-shaped pieces while you’re cutting the cake the first time around. That, or you could eat them when you take a break to watch the Mission Impossible sock puppet show on TV.

Oh, right, and fondant drips… It was my first time with fondant icing, so few-to-no fucks were given about my sloppiness, and I drizzled (if you want to call it that) icing on the cakes without properly tamping or whatever. The point is, I probably lost enough icing that I didn’t have enough to frost all of the petit-fours.

It’s less like a drizzle and more like a
spoon-over.

Despite the exorbitant amount of icing spooned onto each little cake, there ended up being a lot of bald spots. When I tried to remedy them, the icing wasn’t terribly cooperative.

My petit-fours ended up looking more like petit-train-wrecks. This was no tragedy, as they still tasted like petit-fours are supposed to taste (sugary as hell and reasonably delicious). But now that I’ve typed that, I’m having a hard time remembering any occasion on which I actually ate a petit-four and I’m starting to doubt that I ever consumed one prior to this batch of delectable, June-afternoon train-wrecks.

I’ve found that, in general, the frosting/icing recipes that accompany cake recipes yield a disproportionate volume of frosting/icing compared to the yield of cake. Therefore, it dually wasn’t a big deal when I ran out of fondant icing, because I still had plenty of frosting from the attempt of blonde (a word which here means “severely sun-damaged) sort-of Irish car bombs from the day before. I was grateful for the opportunity to use the frosting on something other than making myself sick eating it plain, especially since the frosting was the only part of those sort-of car bombs that came out as intended, but that’s another story.

If you were wondering, the layers of the original
petit-fours weren’t green, just dabbed with raspberry jam.

For the actual protocol I followed, not just the lengthy regurgitation of my personal experience, here’s the link.

Do you have petit-four and/or fondant icing experience? Do you find that the recipes’ assumed cupcake-to-frosting ratio yields a stupid-huge amount of frosting?