Fondant Fancies

Last Saturday, my friend Gilly invited me over to her house for some experimental baking. For Christmas she received a cookbook of Peggy Porschen, who has a fabulous cakes business in England. If you want to see what the cookbook entails, check out the products on her website; seriously, this stuff is amazing.

Gilly wanted to try the recipe for Fondant Fancies, which are classical Petit Fours - small layered cakes, topped with marzipan, and covered in colored poured fondant and decorated. After baking the cake and making the buttercream, we layered the cake, which was roughly 8 in x 8 in.



I made the marzipan from almond paste (which Gilly had previously made) and confectioner's sugar. We next added the layer of marzipan and apricot jam, and sliced the cake into 16 squares:



We next created four different colored batches of poured fondant. The next step was to dip each square into the fondant to get a smooth coating:





And finally, we melted some chocolate to pipe designs on the top of each:





After a full day's effort, our final products like this:



Not too shabby, right? Seriously, this was an amazing day of experimental baking. Not only did we try something fairly challenging, we had a lot of fun doing so and got to practice lots of good skills. We baked and sliced a cake, we made buttercream, we made marzipan, we made the poured fondant, and we practiced our decorative piping skills. It was definitely a day well spent. And, we'll be making classical petit fours like this in class tomorrow so Gilly and I will be ready with what to expect, which is most excellent!