Petits Fours (Take 2)

When I hear the words petits fours, I think of tiny frosted cakes, often with a layer of jam inside, decorated with icing flowers, leaves or ribbons. Those were the only kind of petits fours I ever encountered as I was growing up, and they were only served on special occasions.

It turns out petits fours encompass a much wider range of pastries than that. The name comes from the French words for “small oven.” Back in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, bakers used large brick ovens to make bread, and these ovens took a long time to heat up and cool down. During the cooling process, the bakers would take advantage of the stored heat by baking smaller, more delicate pastries. The lower temperature was referred to as à petit four, or “at small oven.”

So in a French patisserie, petit four can refer to any bite-sized pastry, either sweet or savory.

This challenge for the bakers in the Great White Tent was to make 24 petits fours: 12 sponge-based and 12 biscuit-based. I’m calling this one Take 2 because this is the second petits fours challenge I’ve tackled. You can read about my petits fours from last season here.

Because we are currently in the middle of the 2020 coronavirus stay-at-home order, some ingredients are harder to come by, and it seems foolish to make anything too extravagant, so some of the components I’m using I already had on hand from previous bakes. But I will still include the recipes here, for your convenience.

I decided to make mini Bakewell tarts, utilizing some raspberry filling left over from my chocolate-raspberry star loaf, and tiny tiramisu cakes to use up some coffee buttercream I had in the freezer.

Petit Four No. 1 — Bakewell Tarts

For the Bakewell tarts, I started with a shortbread cookie crust from TheFlavorBender.com. I blind-baked them, added a dollop of raspberry filling and then filled them with frangipane.

I ran into a bit of a problem because I only have six miniature tart molds. After blind-baking the first six shells, I had to decide if I should fill the shells and bake them in the molds, or take them out of the molds and then fill and bake them. 

I chose the latter. 

I chose wrong.

I thought the baked shells would be sturdy enough to hold the filling while it baked, but a few of the tarts expanded so much that the shells split and some of the frangipane spilled out.

Once they were baked and cooled, I topped the tarts with a little bit of almond-flavored icing and a freeze-dried raspberry (because I already had them on hand, too).

Petit Four No. 2 — Tiramisu Cakes

For my tiramisu cakes, I wanted to experiment with a joconde imprimé, or as I like to call it, a striped sponge! Actually an imprimé (French for “imprint”) can be any pattern that is baked into a joconde sponge, but since I’d never made one before, I figured I better start with something simple like a stripe. Besides, I found a pretty straightforward tutorial on how to make it here.

A joconde is a simple, fatless sponge that, because of its versatility, is used as a base for many desserts. It can be layered between buttercream and ganache to form the famous opera cake, or wrapped like a collar around mousse or custard for any number of different entremets. Apparently, it is held in such high esteem by pastry chefs in France that it was named after La Joconde, the French term of endearment for the Mona Lisa, da Vinci’s famous painting of Madam Lisa Giocondo, or La Gioconda in Italian.

I like the description given to this plain yet oh-so-adaptable sponge by Hannah on MilkAndHoneyTheBakery.com: “The Joconde serves as the wind beneath the wings of countless desserts and as such deserves the recognition and the appreciation of anyone who enjoys something sweet now and again.”

The basic method for a joconde imprimé is to start with what’s called a tuile paste made with flour, butter, powdered sugar and, in this case anyway, cocoa powder. It has the consistency of buttercream frosting so it can be piped or spread onto a baking sheet and then frozen before the joconde sponge batter is spread thinly over it. In so doing, the pattern created by the tuile paste remains intact underneath the sponge batter, so that once it’s baked and turned out of the pan, the pattern shows up on the top surface of the cake. 

For my tiramisu petits fours, I used a cake decorating comb and scraped it through the thin layer of tuile paste that I had spread onto a silicone baking mat on a cookie sheet to create a stripe pattern. After freezing it, I spread the joconde batter over the chocolate tuile stripes and baked it at 450°F for 5-7 minutes, just until it started to change color and bounced back when touched.

After removing it from the oven, I sprinkled the warm cake with flour and turned it over onto another cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, then carefully peeled back the silicone baking mat to reveal the pattern. It worked!

Because I had enough tuile paste and batter left over, I actually filled and baked two cookie sheets with the striped joconde, and another, smaller cookie sheet with just the chocolate paste, which I ended up cutting into round shapes to form the bottoms of my tiny cakes.

Through this process, I learned some important lessons: (1) When using a cake decorating comb to make stripes, make sure the cookie sheet you use is perfectly flat. The first batch I made was on a very old baking sheet that was somewhat warped, so I had to push down on the comb very hard to make sure the teeth of the comb went all the way through, leaving blank “stripes” where the sponge batter would fill in. (2) For very small cakes, like I was making, the thinner the sponge the better. My second batch came out thinner, so that’s the one I used to form my cakes. 

Because I don’t have individual-sized pans with removable bottoms, I made cylinders out of food-safe acetate as molds to form my cakes. When the sponge was completely cooled, I cut strips the same length as the circumference of these tubes and wrapped them around the inside of the cylinders. Then I cut circles out of the baked chocolate tuile paste the same size as the bottom of the cylinders (I had to trim them a bit with scissors to get them to fit inside the tubes of cake.) and pushed them down to the bottom of the cake tubes.

To fill my cylinders of cake, I started with the coffee buttercream, piping it about halfway up. I then stuck them in the fridge while I made a mascarpone whipped cream flavored with a little amaretto. I piped that on top of the buttercream all the way to the top. I garnished them with cocoa powder and tiny chocolate hearts.

My husband is not a big eater of sweets, but these were a big hit with him. He kept coming back for more, and at one point remarked that the coffee buttercream was just the perfect amount of coffee and sweetness for him. I also shared a few of these treats with some friends — while practicing proper social distancing, of course — and they enjoyed them immensely!