Modern petits fours usually consist of a geometrically cut piece of sponge cake, topped with fondant and are approximately 25 millimetres (1 inch) square and about 40 millimetres (1.6 inches) high. The fondant which tops the cake is often pastel in color, and commonly decorated with piped icing flowers or other embellishments.
That pretty much jives with everything else I've read. Some sort of sponge cake cut into squares and torted (layered), some sort of filling, and covered in something, typically poured fondant.
This is what they should look like:
Lovely and delicious.
This is what mine looked like:
The phrase, "...a face only a mother would love" comes to mind. They were tasty though. Mmmm...lemony!
So, let's examine what I did and what I'll do differently the next time around (because I don't give up easily).
To begin, make an English sponge cake. Apparently, sponge cakes derive their lift largely from beating egg whites until you essentially have a meringue. Then you add in the yolks.
Then, you fold in sifted flour (I love playing with a sifter!) just until it is incorporated. I forgot to take a picture of the cake in the pan or the whole baked thing because I'm scatterbrained sometimes. It happens.
Here's the finished cake, cooled and severed in twain. If you are a Freemason, you'll chuckle at my verbiage. If you aren't, you'll just think I'm weird.
Now, this sponge cake smelled VERY eggy, as you might imagine something largely made out of eggs might smell. I wasn't happy with that fact though so I made a simple syrup (water and sugar), added in some lemon juice and zest, and brushed this down heavily, both to kill the egginess and to seal the cakes. Next time I make petit fours, I'll make a different cake.
The next step was to make lemon buttercream. I have an ontological discussion with Joanna about once a week regarding how I can call my icing buttercream when it contains no butter. I instead use a shortening base (something many professional bakers do) as it holds up better and doesn't really ever spoil. It is a tricky prospect to get it right because if you don't, you get the weird tongue coating taste of shortening in the buttercream. I've been doing it for a while though and people never know until I tell them.
This discussion was most recently engaged in when she proceeded to make, with a cute scrunched face, the class recipe of Crisco based buttercream that we need to use for the cake decorating class we're taking. When you get right down to it, it is all a matter of taste. She prefers her white whipped icing or real buttercream, I prefer buttercream sans butter and hate stuff like whipped cream icing. I still love her, even though she's wrong. (I'm so going to get punched for that last sentence)
My philosophy is, if it looks like buttercream and tastes like buttercream, it must be a duck. Wait, that's not right...
Skip forward a couple of steps and we have the cake iced and cut into squares. What I did was ice the whole thing, wrap it in foil to freeze it a bit, then cut it down when it was good and solid.
Clearly, I did not use a ruler. Measure once, cut twice. That's what I always say!
The next step was to cover these buggers in poured fondant. I've never worked with poured fondant and I took the cheap way of making it. Technically, you have to heat confectioners sugar to the soft ball stage and then cool it a bit then run it through the food processor. Having only a mini food processor, I just kinda half assed it on the stove.
This stuff was like cement. And it got everywhere. And it dried hard as a rock. And I damn near burned off my fingers cause I had to keep heating it to keep it liquid. Next time, I'm using a simple glaze. By the way, the shirt says "Will fix computer for brains!" Zombie geek humor. Gotta love it!
This is the finished product. I admit, it wasn't quite as I envisioned it.
Though technically meeting the criteria for a petit four, I refuse to denigrate the term and therefore will call these iced lemon cakes. I'm a perfectionist, I know.
So, what will I do differently next time? Well, I'm going to ditch the sponge cake. I'm thinking I'll either do a pound cake or a denser version of my regular cakes. Also, I will torte it more and use less icing/filling in the middle. These were tough to work with. Finally, I'll eschew that stupid poured fondant for royal icing or a basic glaze. The next time I try this, I'm thinking chocolate raspberry.
L'Chaim!
dude, glazed petit fours (petitfiles as i like to call them) are horrible and evil, even to a real pro. it too us sooo long to get good at them. it is something that i hate to be good at because it still sucks. good work at the attempt, it is a really good product for the first time around.
ReplyDelete