Home › Cookies and Small Cakes › Petits Fours
Petits Fours
4 eggs
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1½ teaspoon baking-powder
3 tablespoons cold water
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ tablespoon corn-starch
Flavoring
To the beaten yolks of the eggs, add sugar and cold water. Sift the corn-starch with the flour, baking-powder and salt. Add to first mixture, Beat well and add the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs and any flavoring desired. Bake for one-half hour in a moderate oven (350° F.) in shallow pans. When cool, cut in small circles, split, scoop out a little of the crum from the center of each and fill cavities with whipped cream or any prepared filling. Press together in pairs, dip in melted fondant, decorate with nuts, glacé fruits, and so forth, and place each little cake in a paper case.
This is a plain foam sponge — no butter at all — baked flat, then cut, hollowed, filled and glazed. The assembly, not the batter, is where the work is.
- Pan depth is the whole trickPan depth matters -- "Shallow pans" gives no measurement, but a thin sheet is clearly intended: something on the order of half an inch of batter, in a rimmed half-sheet pan or a lined 9x13. A deep cake cannot be cut into split, filled rounds without the layers dominating the filling.
- Half an hour is too long for a thin sheetThe 350F is right, but a half-inch sponge in a modern oven is done in 12 to 18 minutes, when the top springs back and the edges just pull from the pan. Thirty minutes will give you something dry enough to crack when you split it.
- The cornstarchHalf a tablespoon of cornstarch sifted in with the cup of flour is a small softening measure of the kind common in period cake recipes, which often cut flour with a little cornstarch to lighten it. With modern cake flour you can leave it out and use a level cup.
- Flavoring is left to youNo quantity is given. A teaspoon of vanilla, or half a teaspoon of almond extract, or the grated zest of a lemon suits this batter; anything more will fight the fondant.
- Folding, not beating"Beat well" applies to the yolk-sugar-flour base only. The stiff whites go in by folding in thirds -- there is only half a teaspoon of baking-powder here, so the beaten egg foam is doing most of the lifting.
- Melted fondantPoured fondant is warmed to about body temperature, 100F, and thinned with a little hot water or simple syrup until it ribbons off a spoon. Hotter than that and it dries dull and grainy. Commercial rolled fondant is a different product and will not pour.
- Whipped cream filling limits the keepingCream-filled petits fours must be refrigerated and eaten the same day; the fondant shell will weep in the cold after that. Buttercream, jam or a thick pastry cream holds up far better if you want to make them ahead.
- Paper casesThe "paper case" is the small fluted cup now sold as a petit four or mini-muffin liner. It exists to keep the fondant from sticking to the tray and to the next cake.
Petit four means "small oven," and the name is generally traced to the practice in French bakeries of using the falling heat of the brick oven -- the petit four, as opposed to the grand four at full blast -- for delicate small work after the bread had come out. French usage divides them into petits fours secs, the dry biscuits and tuiles, and petits fours glacés, the fondant-dipped filled cakes described here. That the glacé kind turns up in a household manual of this sort, alongside plain cookies and drop cakes, says something about early twentieth-century American ambition: fondant, glacé fruit and paper cases had become available enough that a home cook was expected to attempt confectioner's work for a tea or a reception. The sponge itself is the era's familiar water sponge, cheap in fat and dependent largely on beaten eggs.