Petit fours, Grand mess

Have you heard of Bakerella? I love her blog. She's taken recipe sharing to a whole new level. Her recipes and photography make your mouth drool, your taste buds tingle and your cooking instinct heightened (I don't even like pancakes, but this post made me want to make them, eat them and wonder why I could ever not like them).

A few weeks ago I offered to throw a baby shower for a friend of mine. When I host, I like to make something special for the event and I decided after seeing the cute petit fours on Bakerella that I would try my hand at them. The shower was on Saturday and I knew I would need two evenings worth of time to make them, so I started on Wednesday night. I made thinly layered pound cake, cut it into layers, spread jam inbetween the layers, even rolled out marzipan to make the icing prettier when the time came. It went so smoothly, and the little, un-iced cakes were pretty tasty! So into the fridge to await the next night when I would be pouring fondant over the little cakes.

I had some great plans for these cakes. I was going to color half of the petit fours yellow and half of them pink and then make little orange buttercream flowers for the top. I made the poured fondant and went to work. The fondant was kind of thick and ugly, which I knew was a possibility, but what I didn't expect was how gross it tasted! The too sweet taste of a mouthful of powdered sugar totally overpowered the delicate balance of the cream cheese pound cake and the strawberry preserves.

And they were ugly. Scott and I decided it was probably a bum recipe, but I didn't have another night to devote to a new recipe. I decided to move on to plan B and just make cupcakes. Scott, however, decided it was worth it to try to salvage the second half of the petit fours.

Attempt two on fondant was from Scott. We read online that you can use the store bought fondant, melt it then pour it. Scott was very careful to do what online bakers recommended. He rigged a double boiler so the fondant wouldn't get too hot, he warmed it really slowly (really slowly) so he wouldn't break down the sugar crystals. I didn't get any pictures of this attempt, but just imagine melting chewed bubble gum and pouring it over cake. That's about the consistency we got, plus a slight chemical taste. It was nasty.

So Scott decided to make one more attempt and cover the petit fours with a chocolate shell. We were pretty optimistic about this idea. Scott made his double boiler again and melted chocolate chips with shortening and began the task. Well, chocolate is a fickle ingredient if you're not used to it, and we are definately not chocolate cooking experts (unlike our Chocolat friends). The chocolate was thick and didn't flow very smoothly.

It was fun to have this cooking adventure with Scott, but it pulled a number on our kitchen. The chocolate attempt was probably the cleanest, but it's the only one I got a picture of and it was still a mess.

Luckily, all was not lost for the baby shower. I just resorted to what I knew I could do: cook cupcakes from a box. Yay for cupcakes!