Sunday, November 22, 2009

Petits Fours

This week has been so busy between school and my baking internship that I hardly had time to bake! But I was determined to challenge myself when I eventually found the time! I decided that petits fours would be a proper challenge and they would be fun to blog about! I knew the undertaking would be difficult, but that has never stopped me before....
The recipe started out perfect: vanilla cake, raspberry jam for the filling, melted white chocolate and cream frosting; perfect. The cake turned out moist and tasty!

I even painstakingly strained the raspberry seeds out of a whole jar of raspberry jam with my tiny strainer... everything was going well! I magically was able to cut the top of the cake off, smear the filling in, and put the top back on without any sort of breakage. The trouble came when I started cutting the petits fours themselves. My knife wasn't that great and the cake kept sticking! Everytime I cut a square, it just looked sloppy. "No worries! I have frosting!"

Yea, I had frosting alright, but my eagerness got the best of me. The frosting was simple: 1/3 cup of heated cream into a bowl of 12 OZ of white chocolate chips. But the one big mistake I made was slopping on the frosting way before it cooled! When I started putting the frosting on I was dissapointed because it literally soaked into my beautiful cake that I worked so hard on!!
(sigh) But the petits fours still turned out delicious and my brother (who usually hates cake) requested I make him more for his birthday which is coming up soon. Even though they were really delicious, I was still dissapointed!


Have you ever worked REALLY hard to make something awesome and it didn't turn out? Where you as dissapointed as me?

1 comment:

  1. Hi Rachel!

    Congratulations on your internship! Here's a tip: when cutting cake, use a clean, sharp chef's knife and dip the knife in water and wipe it off completely after each slice. That way you will get clean slices every time. Also, white chocolate mixed with heavy cream will always be soft because of the high fat content and lack of cocoa solids so if you make a frosting with it, make sure you chill it at least 1 hour before using it.

    ps: I sent you a list of nyc restaurants last night! :)

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