Petits fours

It the Great British/Blogger bake off again and this week we see three more challenges laid down signature trifle, technical floating islands and show stopper petits fours.  So i thought i would attempt the petits fours as i have never done these before.

 I know what they are which is a very small fancy cake and that there is a whole range that your imagination can think of to do and that you need to have a selection of them so i chose to do three types.

I do love a chocolate cake and a small dark chocolate would be my first cake to make, i prefer very good quality dark chocolate that is quite bitter then to cut this with sweet raspberries one of my favorite fruits, i also studded the inside of the chocolate sponge with freeze dried raspberries to give little bursts of intense fruit so it was not all deep dark chocolate.

I have to say there sure was a bit of waste creating these as i even got the tape measure out to make sure each square of chocolate was perfect in size and shape and i rejected anything less than perfect that said i had a disaster darling on my lemon meringue pies sob sob as i made the pastry part i remembered that my husband had told me to thin out my baking tins and that i had boot faired the perfect tin for this job so i had to use these kids silicon stars as they were shallow enough to do the job, so i am not happy i have star shape tarts which are not easy to control rather than lovely round ones.

I choose to do lemon meringue tarts as they are fresh and light compared to the very dark chocolate cakes to begin with i made the lemon curd by hand and the meringue is a piped Italian meringue which i had not made before but i will use this again in the future.  For my third i wanted to push myself a little more and make mousse that can stand up in its own with out the use of a glass, i did not have any ramekins in the house that had loose bottoms, so i got my crafty head on and made some acetate collars and crossed my fingers and everything in the hope that they would work.

i made a thin chocolate cake base and topped this with a dark chocolate ganache mousse and then topped this with a whipped white chocolate mousse and a physalis fruit.  i wanted to do a fruit gel layer between the fruit and mousse but Ella has colic and was kicking off and i had already spent 5 hours in the kitchen and running back and fourth from the shops so ran out of time.  Also the picture below of the mousse you can see is not quite ready as i was just to eager to take a picture of it i think it only had 1 hour setting where as the picture at the top of the post you can see is properly set. 

i enjoyed making petits fours but they is a lot of work involved for such a small cake but i think with practice this can be done faster and i actually like the end results and would probably do these again.

Once again this is linking up with the Great blogger bake off Helen and Jenny