Perfect Petit Fours

Our entire day was devoted to petit four production today and for once, a day were we did an endlessly tedious task was actually fun and relaxing. We started by cutting out little shapes of cake with tiny cutters. We used the almond frangipane cake we made yesterday in a full sheet pan, that was divided into three equal sections, and then spread a very thin later of raspberry jam on two of the sections and then stacked them one on top of another. We were left with dozens of little cakes that were smaller than a quarter and looked like this:


Then we took fondant, which is a white sugar paste, and warmed and thinned it with water and corn syrup so that it was a consistency that we could use for glazing our petit fours. It was a little challenging to glaze the petit four with the fondant because as the fondant cooled, it became thicker and trickier to manipulate and if it was too warm or too thin, the cake showed through. We each needed to present twelve perfect petit four to our chef and they all had to be decorated. We had a wealth of things to decorate with but I just couldn't think of a design to pipe that I thought would fill the space so I tossed some hazelnuts that I halved in gold dust and stuck them on top with a dollop of icing.




My partner and I had a lot of petit four left so we glazed them in some white fondant and I decorated them with some candied violets and candied orange peel. We called them our extra credit petit four.