Next came the petits fours! Wednesday we made an almond sponge cake and a pound cake that we would later layer with fillings and cut into bite sized cylinders. These desserts are common in Europe for high tea or other events. You don't commonly see these little cakes in North America and I think that it's because they're such a pain to make! Seeing as these desserts are all individual, bite sized and often decorated, they take a long time to make. With the almond sponge cake, we baked it in a sheet, cut it into three equal rectangles and layered it with rasperry jam. Then, we rolled and cut a rectangle of almond paste that fit on top of the cake. This chilled while we made the next cake. Then came the the pound cake that we also baked in a sheet and cut into equal sized rectangles. This was layered with a chocolate ganache and vanilla butter cream that we prepared like the lab before. Both of the cakes were then cut with a circular cookie cutter. Let me tell you that this was more difficult than it sounds! My fingertips were actually hurting me a little after this because you had to push with quite a bit of force in order to get the cookie cutter all the way to the bottom of the cake. Another problem was that the cookie cutter was much shorter than the cake, so I managed to somehow reassemble the cakes... I had to get creative. For the raspberry filled cake, we warmed up a little liquid white fondant and poured it over, attempting to cover the entire petit four. The issue I had was that I didn't warm up the fondant enough and didn't add enough sugar-water to thin it out, so you will see in the photos that the fondant didn't quite drip to the bottoms. For the chocolate cake, we spread a little more butter cream along the edges of the cylinders and rolled the cakes with rolled out almond paste. To finish off these petits fours, we piped a little more ganache on the tops. I was pleased with how the cakes turned out... although I'm not in much of a hurry to make these finicky desserts again.

I didn't take the pictures until after I drove all the way home to Hamilton. It is apparent in the pictures that the cakes had a rough ride home and may have toppled over...Oops!