DIY: Homemade Petit Fours

Today I made petit fours in my kitchen, and they were only a partial success— yummy to eat, but not very attractive to look at. As a result, I think I’ll stick to buying them from now on!

I used this recipe, and even though it had a few negative reviews in the comments section, I figured I would use it anyways, because most of the negative reviews seemed to be in the vein of “this recipe was too sweet,” and we all know that’s impossible. I mean, saying “this petit four is too sweet” is like saying, “my life is too great” or “my husband is too awesome” or “this meal is too delicious.” Although I expected it to be hard and time consuming, I wasn’t too worried about my skill level— I don’t consider myself an amateur in the kitchen, so I wasn’t intimidated by white peaks or double boilers.

Now, the actual cake part was easy to make, and tastes absolutely delicious. After greasing and flouring a 9-inch square pan and preheating the oven, I creamed the sugar, shortening, and butter, then added the vanilla. Next came the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt) and the milk, and then I whipped three egg whites and folded them into the batter. Twenty-five minutes in the oven and the cake was done!

I froze the cake for about a half hour as some of the comments suggested, then cut it into small slices. Then I brushed on some heated preserves (I used mostly apricot because that’s what I had in abundance, and then I finished off the batch with some strawberry) and mixed up the icing ingredients (powdered sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, almond extract, and water), then heated them over two pans that I configured to work as a double boiler.

And this is where I ran into trouble— because the frosting came out like fondant, which A) doesn’t taste as good as buttercreme, and B) is  really really hard to spread. The first petit four I attempted to coat came out bulky, like a giant mass of fondant. The next one wasn’t as thickly coated, but it wasn’t very evenly coated. Finally, I resorted to drizzling the fondant “artistically” over the tops of the cake and telling myself that they’d taste the same whether they looked good or not.

And they do— they’re wonderful, really, and they’ll be great for teatime this week, or as a quick little dessert. But I won’t be giving them out to my neighbors, because they look kind of terrible— lumpy and kid of awkward instead of neat and clean like petit fours should look.

And really, petit fours are easy to find in grocery stores these days, so I don’t think I’d make these again. The effort just isn’t worth the final product, I’m sorry to say.

But they were still fun to make, and they’ll be even nicer to EAT! :)