Lemon Petit Fours with Poured Fondant Icing

(The actual title of this post should be FONDANT FAIL, but I shall spare you all the doom-and-gloom feelings I had at points in this process.)

It’s not every day you graduate with your first PhD, and a couple of people from my department are in their writing-up stage, with actual j-o-b-s on the horizon, so our academic department is getting together tomorrow night, along with their families, to fête them, and send them off in style. I offered to bring a dessert, and I thought I’d bring something elegant and fun, like petit fours. What a great idea!

Right.

Petits fours are not easy to make. I would go so far as to say that petits fours are bloody darned hard. Oh, the cake is easy enough — I used my prized lemon cake recipe, which produces a moist, rich, delicious cake. Instead of making it in a loaf pan or a bundt pan, I made it in a large sheet-cake pan lined with oiled, silicone-impregnated parchment. I also added some extra spices (yum, ground cardamom seeds).

What comes next is to:

  1. Bake until cake is fragrant and done, and remove it to a cooling rack.
  2. While it’s on the rack, drizzle on a mixture of 1/2 cup lemon juice and 1 cup sugar (the sugar should be dissolved).
  3. Let it cool for 15 minutes, then flip it over onto another cooling rack, remove the parchment, and flip it back onto the first rack.
  4. Cut it in half horizontally, remove the top layer to your spare rack, and slather the bottom layer (middle of the cake) with a mixture of lemon curd, lemon juice, and sugar (use some of the leftover syrup you poured over the top), removing most of the excess.
  5. Replace the top layer and leave to cool completely.
  6. Mix up some version of Poured Fondant Icing. We substituted honey for the corn syrup (corn syrup can be found at exactly ONE store here, and it was a five block walk, and I wasn’t in the mood), lemon juice for the water, and almond extract for the vanilla extract. We colored ours, by boiling saffron threads in the lemon juice. And, we cooked ours to 160F rather than 110F, so that it’d be a bit thinner, and set up a bit harder.
  7. Cut your cake into petit fours shapes, and have some fun trying to ice them.

Right. That takes care of the technicalities.

First mistake: boiling the sugar at a higher temperature. The longer/hotter you boil fondant, the less water you have in it, and the thicker fondant you have. It spooned out beautifully… and set almost immediately. T. was following me, sprinkling pink (beet juice dyed) raw sugar on the tops of the cake for decoration, and if she was two seconds behind me instead of one, the sugar bounced off. And boy, were they DIFFICULT to get iced! We tried holding them over the pot of fondant & spooning, but couldn’t settle on a method which didn’t leave holes in the fondant. Bamboo skewers were kinda working, but were a bit … risky feeling, as if the cake would end up dropping into the pot. (One did. We had to excavate rather quickly.) Same deal with forks, and tongs just pulled away the frosting in huge chunks. So, we tried pouring the fondant. Oh, my, the lakes of sugar … and the edges where the fondant didn’t coat…!!!

The whole idea of fondant is to seal in a cake’s moisture … and to make cake that looks elegant. Instead of elegant, these looked kinda lumpy and very homemade. Ugh, disappointment.

Also, there were very few sugar-free surfaces in the kitchen. There was something sticky everywhere, it seemed. There was blood and sweat. There was exasperation and exclamation. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth. It was Not Good.

And then we sampled some.

Well, the fondant properly sealed in the cake moisture, all right. It was moist inside, and perfect. But the fondant was so hard that biting into it …made it shatter. Huge chunks of tasty, almond-flavored… rock flaked away in crumbles. It was NOT what was supposed to happen.

It was, in fact, a TOTAL FAIL.

Predictably, T. lay down on the floor and held her breath until she turned blue (a prodigious feat) and I kicked and punched a few cabinets. And then, we had a few thoughts: 1.) It’s just sugar. No harm, no foul if a dessert doesn’t turn out right. And, 2.) There’s never any good reason to waste cake.

So, we saved aside the best of the fondant-covered cakes to share, and went on to dessert B – Child-Friendly, Americanized Trifle.

Traditional British Sherry Trifle is a confection of cake and liquor and custard and fruit. We haven’t ever had it, but have heard a lot about it — and most of what we’ve heard is that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. (Despite this, it seems like it’s always served in books!) The layer dessert of sponge cake, berries, sherry, custard and whipped cream sounds like a hybrid of Tiramisù, which is savoiardi (aka ladyfinger) cookies; coffee or coffee liquor; egg yolks, and marscapone cheese; and T’s mom’s Nilla Pudding, which is Vanilla Wafer cookies topped with banana pudding, sliced bananas and whipped cream.

Our version of trifle is squares of sticky lemon cake — with the over-excitable fondant cracked off and removed, a freshly cooked vanilla custard (what’s another quick walk to the store for eggs?), fresh Scottish blackberries, and just a hint of whipped cream. It’s beautiful, and no one need ever know that in a past life, it was a complete and utter disaster.

No one but you, right? We’ll keep it our little secret.

8 Replies to “Lemon Petit Fours with Poured Fondant Icing”

  1. I'm having my own fun with runny rhubarb pie. I've tried the flour thickening method and the corn starch. Neither one seems to be working. Ah well, there are WEEKS of summer left.

    And it still tastes good.

  2. Yes, those little darlings look so easy, but are, as you found, the devil to make nice looking. I tried once but now buy petit fours if I absolutly must have them for some reason.
    Love the Julia Child you pulled with the trifle…and the named variants. I like the idea of it with blackberries!

  3. I agree with the comments above. Despite the disappointment, still looks tasty. And the pink sprinkles make it look purty. If I ever see the recipe, I think I'll go running the other way. I'm glad you were able to turn it around. Your trifle sure looks good, too.

    Paz

  4. Absolutely wonderful (and honest) post! We so often post our successes and hide our failures it was great to read this… and, in all honesty, the fondant cakes don't look so bad, I'm glad you were able to salvage them tho' 🙂

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