No. 3374

Fancy Cakes—Soft

Petits Fours Moelleux

Crush one pound of almonds with a pound and a half of sugar and five egg-whites; let this paste be very fine; lay it on a table and add a tablespoonful of strawberry essence and three more whites, and beat until it is very smooth and has attained body. Put a part of it in a channeled socket pocket and push it on a paper-covered baking sheet into small cakes shaped like an S, commas, knobs, etc. Decorate each one with a fancifully cut candied fruit or very white almonds and leave to dry in a cool place for four or five hours. Then bake in a hot oven and gum as soon as removed.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a piped almond macaroon paste, closer to modern French massepain petits fours than to anything from a cake tin. The whole method depends on the paste being ground and beaten smooth enough to hold a piped shape, then air-dried until a skin forms.

Scale and yieldA pound of almonds with a pound and a half of sugar and eight whites in total makes a very large batch — roughly 100 to 120 small cakes. Quartering it is sensible for a home batch.
"Crush one pound of almonds"Blanched almonds, pounded in a mortar with the sugar and whites so the sugar keeps the nuts from turning to oily butter. A food processor does the same job if you add the sugar from the start and pulse rather than run it, stopping while the paste is still cool.
"Channeled socket pocket"Ranhofer's term for a pastry bag fitted with a fluted or star tube. Nothing more exotic is meant; a piping bag with a medium star tip gives the ridged S shapes and commas he describes.
Strawberry essenceA concentrated flavouring extract, not syrup or pur ataste as taste as you add; kirsch, rose water or a good vanilla are plausible substitutes.
The drying stage is the hingeFour or five hours uncovered in a cool place lets a dry skin form on the piped shapes. Skip it and the cakes spread, crack and lose their ridges in the oven. Leave them at room temperature, not in the refrigerator, where they will pick up moisture.
"A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures, only terms such as 'hot oven', so any modern figure is a guess; for almond paste this small it means a short bake, until the surface is barely coloured and the base set. Almond and sugar scorch quickly, and the interior is supposed to stay soft, which is what moelleux means.
"Gum as soon as removed"Brush the hot cakes with gum arabic dissolved in a little hot water, or with a thin apricot glaze, which gives a similar gloss and is easier to buy. Ranhofer specifies doing it as soon as they leave the oven, so the glaze is meant to go on hot.
Paper-covered baking sheetParchment now, and worth peeling the cakes off while still slightly warm; cooled almond paste welds itself to paper.

A Little History

Petit four means "small oven," a name generally traced to the practice of baking these delicate items in the falling heat of a masonry oven after the bread and roasts had come out — though this recipe, calling for a hot oven, belongs to the later era of ranges that could be brought back up to temperature at will. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York in two spells — roughly 1862–1876 and 1879–1896 — before publishing The Epicurean in 1894, devotes dozens of numbered entries to these one-bite cakes because a fashionable dinner ended with a tray of them, and a chef was judged on the variety he could show. Moelleux — soft, marrowy — distinguishes this almond-paste family from the crisp iced and glazed sorts elsewhere in the section, and the mixture is essentially the same marzipan-and-egg-white base European confectioners had long worked with, tinted and flavoured to order and finished with candied fruit that also signalled the flavour inside.