Petit Fours

Being from New Orleans, I love petit fours.  Yummy, moist, little cakes with sweet frosting.  But apparently, the French refer to more than just a yummy, small, square piece of cake as a petit four.  I recently bought The Art of French Baking and I want to make everything in it.  I decided to just go through the book one recipe at a time since there aren’t photos of everything and I know I will be too picky if I try to read every one.  Plus I want to just try different things - sometimes I feel like when I read recipes, I get too critical and then end up not branching out and learning new things.  

The book starts with small cakes.  The first set of recipes are for babas, for which I have no pan (I will go back to them later), so I skipped to petit fours.  It’s a very basic recipe of flour, eggs, vanilla, salt, superfine sugar, baking powder, butter and raisins.  They came together very easily and they are very much like little scones.  Sweet, but not overly so.  Moist, but with a crumbly texture.  And the raisins provide perfect, little bursts of sweetness.  I really like them, but they are certainly not the petit fours I grew up with.  They have many variations in the book and I’m looking forward to making them all!