This book is a petit square book, which is highly appropriate considering the content.

If you have ever considered making petit Four (which apparently means ‘little oven’ in French), then this book is a good place to start. After a small intro from the author, there are a couple of chapters on equipment and techniques. These are well worth reading if you are new to petit fours. There then follows a very useful directory, split into four sections; cakes, syrups, fillings, and decorations.

The recipes themselves however, are separated into sections based on various holidays or events such as All Occasions, Elegant, Children’s Party, Weddings etc with appropriate flavours for each theme. I actually found this a little confusing.

As you delve into the first section (All Occasions) the picture offers some decorating suggestions, then you get the recipes for vanilla sponge, vanilla syrup, and the vanilla buttercream, but then you are sent towards the end of the book to find the recipe for the marzipan, then back to the All Occasions section for the dipping chocolate, then off towards the back of the book again for the decorating chocolate. There seems a lot of unnecessary and frustrating flipping backwards and forwards.

Once you have read through several of the recipes, you quickly discover that the recipes are quite similar with a slight variation. For instance, do the white, yellow, and orange modelling chocolate all need a recipe page when the only variation is a different food colouring? Also, the recipes for the fillings and syrups don’t match volume wise, to the sponge recipes. I followed the recipes for the lemon cake petit fours, and only used half of the syrup and less than half of the lemon cream cheese filling which is annoyingly wasteful. The recipes do say the yield, but not how much you will need for the cake recipe.

The photos that are there are pretty and colourful, but I would have liked a few more. I would have liked to have seen some more examples of piped designs for the tops of the petit fours – even if it had just been a page of designs to follow.

The recipes themselves have clear step by step instructions. Each individual step is fairly straight forward, but each small cake is a complex process of several steps. The measurements are in US cups, and I am always a little disappointed when a publishers doesn’t include metric weights as well, or reprint when they decide to release a recipe book outside the US. There is a conversion list at the back, but I am not sure of its accuracy. For instance, it lists a US cup as equivalent to 3 fluid ounces, where as I understand it is 8. It also lists a tablespoon as 60 millilitres, where it is actually only 15ml. It lists ‘pound’ under volume, which is a weight. Every cook or baker knows you can’t do a straight conversion between weight and volume.

These issues aside, I think that anyone with a reasonable level of cake decorating should be able to cope with making these decadent treats. My attempts were not quite as neat as the author’s, but sadly I don’t have special petit four cutters, so tried to cut the cake into small squares with a knife which proved messy to say the least.

The end results were indeed delicious, and quite pretty. I think you could do a lot worse whiling away a wet and rainy spring weekend making these treats for your friends or family. There are many varieties of petit four, but while this book is not comprehensive, it is a good introduction into a basic form of this style of cake.

This book is available now from Ulysses Press