Today we are going to continue with a talk about Thanksgiving goodies. This is a recipe for how to make your own homemade festive Thanksgiving petits fours.

Petits fours are a favorite of many, you know that cute, tiny cakes at the bakery that is so very rich. Store-bought petits fours can be expensive and made several days before you get them. Many think that making petits fours is a complicated secret only the bakers know. But we know, our Grandmother knew and she gave us the know-how also. Making homemade petits fours is really not very complicated, but it does have multiple parts. Making homemade petits fours also can take a couple of days, as some parts need time to “dry” before you continue with the next step.

Part one is to make the cake. Part two is the apricot glaze. Part three is the icing. Part four is decorating. Part five is the best part, the eating.

We love variety so we made several different versions of petits fours here. We have plain silver cakes, green and red cakes. We did single layer and double layers. We also did different colors for the icing and different decorations on top.

PART ONE: the cake

To make petits fours you will want a white or silver cake. This is done by omitting the yellow egg yokes and only using the egg whites. Not only does this make your white petits fours very pretty but it makes it easier to color your cakes.

As we are sure, if you have read any of our other talks, we use everything we can and through nothing away if we can help it. With this recipe, we separated the egg whites for the cake. But we did not throughout the egg yokes, we cooked them for the senior dog. He loved his special treat and it is good for him.

The eggshells, we also saved. Eggshells are a great fertilizer for garden plants, they are good extra calcium for chickens and they do well in the mulch bucket. So be sure, you can reuse it if you have a mind to.

There are 2 ways to make petits fours, the traditional, old-fashioned way, and the quick way. Really there are only 2 ways to make the cake part. The other steps are the same either way.

The quick version is to buy a ready “boxed” cake mix. It is quick and easy to follow the directions on the back of the box. In a mixer, mix the cake mix, oil, water, and egg whites. And there, in less than 1 hour, you have a cake. The boxed mixes do not taste like a homemade cake, of course. This may not matter that much to you. After you add all the other stuff, the cake is really only there to hold the icing and sprinkles.

The old-fashioned cake-making does take more time and more ingredients but it gives you a homemade taste. We use an old cookbook that our Grandmother had and used a lot. Every house should have The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook. This cookbook has just about every recipe or some version of every recipe that a household could need. When we find one of these great books at a yard sale or GoodWill, we grab them. Often we give one of these as a wedding gift, it is a great book to start a new home with.

Do not forget the no-stick cooking spray. You do not want your little cakes to get stuck to the pan and tear apart.

We made plain white cakes, green cakes, and red cakes. We separated the cake mix into three pans, so we could color them differently. Using the food coloring, add a few drops into the cake batter until you get the color you want. It is easier if you use the pan you are cooking in to do the color mixing. This way you save using another bowl. Note, the color of the cake will be a bit darker once it is cooked. Make the batter color just a little lighter than the color you want to end up with.

Whatever way you go about it, make your cake and let it cool. Some recipes call for leaving the cake overnight to let it set up. It is easier to work if the cake is not too soft and falling apart. We did let our cakes cool for about an hour before we started the next step.

Depending on what pan you used, you will either have a tall cake or a thin one. With petits fours, most cooks make them layered but you do not have to, you can have a single layer petits fours. Decide if you want one thick layer or two thinner layers.

We cut our thick cakes to make two and the thinner ones we left as they were. You can see this in the different pics. Our white cake was tall so we cut it in half. The green and red cakes were already thin so we left them as they were.

Then we cut the cakes into the petits fours style. Making small, square cakes, about one inch each. Well, ok our squares are not always square but close enough. We recommend the person with the steadiest hands do the “square” cutting.

The cutting part can be tricky and we do tend to have a good bit of leftover cakes that are not pretty enough to make petits fours with. But that is ok, just save the pieces to use as topping on the finished petits fours or just eat them.

PART TWO: the apricot glaze

If you are making petits fours the main “secret” is the apricot glaze. Take a jar of apricot jam. Dilute the jam with warm water and mix. Try to get the apricot glaze smooth and the consistency of honey.

When you have the jam the smooth consistency you want, pour it over the cakes. If you have split your cakes into layers you will want to be sure all layers are covered. Let the diluted jam soak up into every part of the cakes. This may take more than one jar of jam depending on how many petits fours you are planning to end up with.

This part can be left to sit overnight. Every piece of cake needs to soak up the jam liquid. Once the cake has soaked the liquid, the cake will start to firm up due to the sugar content in the jam. The cakes should be firm but moist when done.

We left our cakes covered overnight and let them sit. This makes the cakes a little drier and less likely to fall apart when handled.

PART THREE: the icing

We use the old-fashioned powdered sugar recipe for our icing. Well, we do not actually have much of a recipe, it is more of a suggestion of a recipe.

Take a bag of powdered sugar, mix in your chosen liquid and blend until smooth. Now, this can be different depending on what your desired end result is.

You can use powdered sugar with heavy whipping cream for a very rich icing. If you mix regular sugar into the powdered sugar, you will get icing with a “raw” texture. As you are the artist, make your icing the way you want it.

We used powdered sugar, our favorite coffee creamer, and a hint of real vanilla extract. For this recipe, we used pure white, Mexican vanilla. Mexican vanilla also comes in the dark if you are not making a white cake, the taste is the same as the white vanilla.

Make sure you use, REAL vanilla extract. We learned something a few months ago that really we wished we did not know. Vanilla flavoring, the fake kind, is made from extracting the juice from the butt gland of a beaver. Not sure how one does that but we really do not want to know anyway. Why would anyone ever have thought to make a cooking flavoring like that? Hope we never used fake before and will definitely never use it in the future.

It is easier to use an electric mixer than to try to mix this by hand. The mix gets very thick and really takes some welly to get it smooth.

In the mixer, we blend our powdered sugar and creamer until we have smooth icing. Usually, we are pouring the icing, not spreading it. So we make our icing a bit thinner than most. In the end, we have an icing with the consistency of Elmer’s glue. This consistency pours and spreads but does not run off the cake as much as a thinner mix.

When we get the mix right, we separated some into different bowls. This way we can make different colors of icing.

A few drops of food coloring and good mixing and there you have it. We did dark green, red, blue, mint green, and plain white icing. There were some other color variations that were created in this attempt but we finally got colors that we wanted to use.

Do take note that the food coloring will color anything, the cakes, the icing, the table cloth, the floor, and the kids. Whatever the food coloring gets onto will be colorful and festive as well. The food coloring will wear off the kids but not so much the table cloth or floor.

Here is where you have another long stop. Pour the icing onto the cakes and let them sit. With the thick icing, it will slowly spread across the cakes and soak in. You want the icing to completely cover the cakes or at least the sides that you can get at first. Yes, the icing process can be messy but the kids have a ball anyway.

After a few hours or even overnight, check the icing progress. We left our cakes to sit overnight, covered in the stove. Again, the icing will have soaked into the cakes and “dried” a bit.

Once the icing is “dry” enough to handle, you will need to turn them over and do the bottom side with icing. The steps are the same, pour the icing, get it all over the cake’s bottom and sides. Then again, let the cakes sit until the icing is “dry” enough to handle.

This is where you decide if you are going to have single petits fours or double layers, like the ones you get in the stores.

Single cakes are easy, do nothing but keep icing.

Double layer is what it sounds like. Put one piece of cake on top of another to get a two-layer cake. The icing will help to keep the pieces together, like mortar in bricks. Then just add another layer of icing to “cover” the blemishes. It may be helpful to use a toothpick to hold the two pieces together until the icing hardens.

We had to re-spread or re-pour our icing several times to get full coverage that we were proud of. It does take a good bit of sugar and icing to get complete coverage on each piece of cake. Do not get discouraged, just keep up the icing and it will get there. As we said, we had to put several coats of icing on our petits fours before we got it to look right.

Putting your petits fours in the fridge for a while will speed up the firming process. We do not have room in our fridge but if you do it will make things go faster.

PART FOUR: the decorating

As we said, we love variety so we make our petits fours in different colors and decorations. We used colored sugar crystals to decorate the tops of the petits fours in festive designs. Admittedly, we are not artists so our designs are kind of free-form. Making complimentary colors, we have various color schemes. We also used some of the not-perfect cakes to crumble up onto the tops of the petits fours as decoration.

You can make your petits fours colors and designs to your personal liking. The kids have a great time coloring and decorating their petits fours. This can be a bit of a mess but it is only sugar so clean up is pretty easy.

This is a good recipe/project to get the kids involved in. They love mixing the colors and putting the icing on the little cakes. And of course, the sugar sprinkles are fun. If you come up with too many cakes, too much icing, or spill the sprinkles, the kids are always eager to help with that.

We do recommend you clean up the kitchen and used dishes as you go. The icing can get pretty hard when it dries out and it can be hard to get out of the bowls and off the plates. The dogs are happy to help clean up also but too much sugar is not good for dogs so keep that to a lick or two only.

PART FIVE: the eating

After the petits fours are made, iced, and decorated you are ready for the real fun, eating them. petits fours are very rich and sweet so a good cup of coffee is a must.

We are true believers and supporters of Black Rifle Coffee Company. Black Rifle not only makes a great cup of coffee but they are veteran-owned and operated. Black Rifle has a great community of nutty, kooky people that make the coffee experience so much better. If you have not tried Black Rifle coffee, we highly recommend you do.

Petits fours make a great alternative to the traditional birthday cake. They also go over well at family get-togethers, church eating, and school bake sales.

We will admit that our petits fours may not be as perfect as the ones you buy at the store but they are good enough for us. We had a fun family time making our petits fours, we know what is in them and we had a chance to show off our artistic flair, as it is.

Flour alternatives can be used for gluten-free. There are substitutes for eggs and butter if you are vegan or have allergies. You can tweak the recipes to make your petits fours just the way you want them. You can add flavors to the cake mix or to the icing if you want vanilla, chocolate, caramel, or whatever suits your fancy.

We hope you have enjoyed this recipe and walk-through of How to make your own homemade festive Thanksgiving petits fours. Please try it out for yourself and see how much fun it can be.

Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.