Petit Fours: Round One

In my last post, I had mentioned wanting to attempt to make petit fours because ordering them from a bakery is so dang expensive. Well, I made that attempt today, and let me tell you, it's not easy. No wonder they charge so much.

I went the cheap and easy way out this time around and made them with boxed pound cake. I chose pound cake because it is firmer than normal cake. I think I will make the cake from scratch next time around. It turns out even firmer than the boxed kind does.

Anyway, I made the loaf cake and it turned out really beautifully.

I then cut this into roughly 1 inch thick slices.

I then cut the edges off and cut the slice in half.

With these slices, I made cubes. Thankfully, this was a trial run, because these cubes weren't perfect. 

I only used about half of the loaf, because I wanted to have some left in case I needed to try again. This made about 16 cubes.

Next, came the hard part. I put wax paper under my cooling tray to catch any spills made. I heated up a bit of store-bought icing for about 10 seconds and put a bit of food dye in it. The first three cubes I iced by pouring the icing over it. I quickly learned that this wasted a bunch of icing. Although there was a lot of icing running off of the cubes, the tops of these looked nice and smooth.

However, the icing didn't completely cover the sides.

So, I took a different approach. I stuck a fork into the cubes and tried dipping a few of them. This worked fine but did not give the nice finish to the tops and left fork holes in them. 

I iced the last few cubes by dipping then pouring more icing over the tops. This made the tops smooth like the first but just didn't have the outcome I wanted. I kept in mind that this was a trial run, so I just continued to have fun with it!

Some looked better than others and that's ok! They will get eaten anyway!

I put a few white pearl decorations on the best iced ones as a final touch. 

So, the next time around, I am going to change a few things: 

1. I am going to do a little online recipe digging and come up with a really good icing to use that will be easy to make and pour.

2. Put a cookie sheet under they cooling tray to catch any run off icing to reuse.

3. Work on my cube cutting skills

4. Make the icing more lavender, less grey.

All in all, it was fun and they tasted great! They turned out kind of cute too!

Til next time,

Thanks for reading!!

Burgundy