Petit Fours and A Memorial Day Picnic

Last weekend I had a delightful adventure making petit fours with my friend Becca. She is a big fan of these small treats and had always wanted to make them. 

Earlier last week Woodley and I had hoped to fly up to Bellingham for the weekend, but we delayed too long and couldn't get tickets. Similarly, Becca also had weekend plans that fell through leaving us both with a blank long weekend. We decided to put our time to good use making petit fours for a Memorial Day picnic on Monday. Little did we realize what we were in for!

As it turns out, petit fours are amazingly complicated to make and we spent at least 20 hours over the course of 3 days making ours. (Mostly that was probably my fault because I had so much fun making the cake for the first batch that I suggested we make 2 other kinds. Silly me!)

I don't have too many pictures of the process yet because they are still on Becca's camera, but I'll post more later. In the meantime, here's the petit four making process, in a nutshell (We used the Joy of Cooking for our recipes): 

1. Bake a fairly complicated cake in a jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper. (we made a Milk Sponge Cake, a Chocolate Genoise Cake, and a White Lady Cake). When the cake comes out of the oven, cover the top with aluminum foil and flip it over 180 degrees as you remove it from the pan so that the parchment paper is at the top and the foil is at the bottom. Allow the cake to cool. 

2. Carefully remove the parchment paper and aluminum foil from the cooled cake. As you peel it of, you should remove the dark brown layer from the top and bottom of the cake. Cut the cake into 3 equal sized pieces. 

3. Brush the bottom two pieces of cake with jelly (or another filling of your choice, we used raspberry jelly and rhubarb orange jelly). If you are using a Genoise Cake you should also brush the layers with moistening syrup before applying the jelly filling. Stack the 3 layers on top of each other. 

4. Cover the cake with saran wrap, top with a baking pan, fill the pan with as many canned goods as will fit, and stick the whole stack in the refrigerator to compact. (I found this step very amusing because the cakes that we had just taken such pains to make light and fluffy were then squished overnight to remove any extra lightness an air.)

5. Remove the compacted cakes from the refrigerator and remove the saran wrap. Brush the top layer with jelly filling and cover with a 1/8th inch layer of marzipan. 

6. Cut the petit fours into 1x1 inch squares. 

7. Make a glaze topping to be used to cover the petit fours. (We had some trouble with this but ended up making 3 different types of glazes, a bittersweet chocolate glaze, a fondant glaze, and a white chocolate glaze. They all tasted very unique and different.)

8. Glaze the petit fours by dribbling the liquid glaze over them or by dipping them into a big bowl of glaze using chop sticks (I used the later method and it worked quite well). Allow the petit fours to drip and dry on a cooling rack. 

9. Decorate the petit fours as you wish. (We used a sliver of almond for some and ball candy decorations for others.)

9. Eat them right away or refrigerate for later. 

Whew!!! I sincerely doubt I will attempt those again unless I someday have a little girl who really really really wants to learn to make them for a tea party.

We also decided to make some tea sandwiches for our tea party picnic. We made: Smoked Salmon Pinwheels, Egg Salad Sandwiches, Cucumber Sandwiches, and Curried Chicken Salad Sandwiches. 

Here I am preparing the Smoked Salmon Pinwheels. I rolled out a large piece of white bread to flatten it, spread it with cream cheese, and am now covering it with watercress leaves before adding the salmon and a dash of lemon juice:

Here are the curried chicken salad sandwiches in the making:

Woodley helped us get some nice tiered serving trays (from Target). They worked perfectly for serving the sandwiches and petit fours!

A big beautiful tray of petit fours!

At the picnic:

Here's a close up of the Lady Cake Petit Fours filled with either Raspberry Jelly or Rhubarb Orange Jelly and glazed with Fondant Icing. 

Here are the Chocolate Genoise Cake Petit Fours filled with Raspberry Jelly and covered with a Bittersweet Chocolate Glaze.

And here, on the left, are the Milk Sponge Cake Petit Fours filled with Raspberry Jelly and covered with a White Chocolate Glaze. 

All the petit fours tasted amazingly rich and delicious so we considered all our hard work a big success. And it was such a perfect day for a picnic!!

~ElizabethRose

Catching Up...

The above picture is one of my favorite parts of my bedroom. The flowers in the picture are a kind of large counted cross stitch. I discovered the framed cross stitch at the Alameda Flea Market last summer for just $25. I fell in love with it right away despite the small amount of water damage. I just love the color combination and the beautiful roses. Hopefully one day it will end up on the wall but for now I think it looks lovely on top of my dresser.

Well, I was sadly very delinquent in my blog postings last week. That was because I was out of the house from 7am till 6pm each day attending a course on Breastfeeding Counselor Training put on by The Center for Breastfeeding with The Healthy Children Project. It was a great course and I hope to be able to use the information I learned through volunteering in the community.

In other exciting news from last week. On Sunday night (the 22nd) we had our friend Becca over for dinner. She brought some lovely potatoes and we cooked the dinner together which was lots of fun. I found some new recipes to try on Epicurious and they all turned out fantastically! I think I may have discovered my new favorite menu! Here's what we made (the links take you to the actual recipes on Epicurious):

Cedar Planked Salmon with Maple Glaze

Mustard Mashed Potatoes

Lacinato Kale and Ricotta Salata Salad
Apple Galettes with Caramel Sauce

Here's a picture of the salmon before it went into the oven. It's sitting on a cedar plank that we had picked up in Bellingham, Washington (my home town) last year when we visited. I hadn't ever used it before so I was very excited to try it out. The salmon is resting on some scallion greens and has been brushed with a ginger maple glaze - Yum!! It came out perfectly and was absolutely delicious!

To serve the salmon we put some of the mustard mashed potatoes on our plates, piled the salmon on top, and drizzled the whole thing with more ginger maple glaze! Yum, yum! The mashed potatoes were great and weren't too mustardy which I was worried about initially.

After dinner we made the Apple Galettes and their Caramel Sauce. It was my first experience working with puff pastry which I had found frozen at the grocery store. I was a little nervous about it but it turned out to be very easy to use. Here's a picture of the galettes right before we put them in the oven:

We baked them much longer than the recipe called for - perhaps 30 to 40 minutes but perhaps that was because our apple slices were a bit thick. When they finally came out of the oven they were a lovely golden color and smelled divine! I put them on the special dessert plates my mom gave me several years ago and we drizzled them with their caramel sauce (also divine!) and plopped a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the top. The results looked and tasted amazing! This is definitely my new favorite dessert. It wasn't too hard to make and looked and tasted just like something from a fancy restaurant (or possibly better!). I would definitely recommend them! They also have some almond paste in the middle of the galette under the apples which really adds to the flavor. Here's a picture of the final product just before we dug in:


The other big thing to report from last week was the addition of a new member to our small family. It turned out the Valicia did indeed need someone to look after Leila, her adorable kitty, while she is working in Korea for the next few months. Leila arrived on Saturday the 21st and has been gradually getting used to her new surroundings. She is such a lovely kitty and is very companionable. The first day she was quite shy and scared but she has really warmed up to us over the past week and is now quite comfortable running around the house. The only thing that still scares her is Woodley's harp. We aren't quite sure what the problem is with the harp, but every time Woodley starts practicing, she runs for the bedroom to hide.

Isn't she cute!

Valicia and David came over to visit her last Tuesday and brought us dinner which they fixed up over here. That was such a lovely treat because I was exhausted from my class and didn't have any energy too cook. The meal was wonderful and it was so nice to get to spend some time with them. Leila also loved the visit and was so happy to see them both.

It is so nice to have a cat around the house and Leila is a great companion. Right now she is curled up on my desk, just to the left of my keyboard. I think she wants to help with the blogging! I'll work on getting some more pictures of her to share in the next few days.

Now, to finish up, here are a few notes from last weekend:

Friday I finished with my class. In the evening we met up with Woodley's parents for dinner before going to see a silent movie at The California Theater in San Jose. It was a great night and it was such a treat to hear The Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

Saturday we headed up north to attend Woodley's great-aunt Audrey's Surprise 86th birthday party. We picked up Woodley's cousin on the way it was so nice to get to catch up with her. The party was very nice - Woodley and I danced a lot! and we had fun visiting with all the family. On the way home we dropped off Louise and went to Woodley's all time favorite restaurant for dinner - Ti Couz in San Francisco. I usually don't like going there very much because it is always quite crowded and noisy but it wasn't too bad that night.

Sunday we went to the Alameda Flea Market but didn't spend very long at it because it was a rainy day and there were only a few vendors set up. Since we finished much earlier than we had expected, we headed over to San Francisco and went to the newly renovated California Academy of Sciences. We didn't have too much time there so we only were able to explore the aquarium in the bottom level and the rain forest exhibit. The aquarium was by far our favorite. We hope to go back on a different day to see the Planetarium Show, the Living Roof, and the African Hall

This brings us to today, Monday.

I have a few to dos that I'm hoping I can get to today. Perhaps if I write them down here I'll be more motivated to get through them all. :)

1. Catch up on email from last week
2. Bake a loaf of whole wheat bread
3. Start gathering information about what we need to do to pay the California Use Tax
4. Wash and dry the linens
5. Clean the bathroom
6. Plan menus for today, Tuesday, and Wednesday
7. Go grocery shopping

I'll report back later!