Petits Fours Test

our petits fours test was to make up four of our own petits fours. these are my four on the right.



i chose a fall theme, since it was almost fall.




this is a sweet potato tart in a puff pastry shell. it is like thanksgiving. (it is like my very very favorite part of thanksgiving, in fact.)


the shells puffed a little out of control, so the tarts are a little crazy-shaped. but they tasted pretty good. i think i should used a deeper mold next time.



pears are for fall, and my favorite pear snack is pears with cheese and black pepper on crackers. this is like a fancy version of that. it is a diamond of puff pastry, a little square of gruyere, a swirl of pear-black pepper pastry cream, and a pear garnish.

of course i love it because i made it, but my chef liked it, too.



maybe i talked to too many boys about this test, but when i mentioned my fall theme, they only said one thing: "football." nothing else. so i decided to make my cake into a football shape. i looked all over for the perfect-sized football cutter, but ended up having to bend out a heart cutter. it worked, though.


this is a hazelnut-gingerbread sponge layered with a little lemon curd. making the sponge was tricky. i adapted a recipe for a chocolate-hazelnut sponge. originally i thought i'd just substitute the cocoa with gingerbread spices, but gingerbread also needs molasses. so i thought maybe i could substitute molasses for part of the hazelnut paste. but then i realized that the recipe doesn't have flour, so if i started taking out hazelnut paste, it would be a sticky mess that fell apart. so, i had to decide if molasses was more like hazelnut paste (texture), egg whites (moisture), or sugar (sweetness). i decided it was all three and took a little of all of them out and put molasses instead. oh, and it worked. i was honestly a little surprised. the flavor was strong, but good.


this one was sort of the dud. it was a caramel apple filling in a sesame tuile. i don't think the apples were caramel-y enough, but that wasn't the real problem. the sesame tuile came out weird. i had never tried it before, and i thought it was going to be more like the almond tuile-- thin and caramel-y and crunchy. apparently you should spread the sesame one more.