Easy Petit Fours Recipe - How to make petit fours [Sweet] 🍥 (2024)

I think this easy Petit Fours Recipe is essential during any festive season!

These French little indulging treats are great to make with kids too and petit fours don't need to be necessarily complicated little sweets.

So, what are Petit Fours essentially, you might ask?

Petit Fours [pronunciation] are bite-sized appetizers or snacks.

Basically, they can be sweet or savory, but more often we associate petit fours with sweet bites.

The more elegant looking petit fours, commonly seen at special functions, are always pretty looking, perfected & elaborate bites.

In local homes in France, sweet petit fours tend to look more down to earth and maybe not that catchy because there is no rule what a petit four may or may not be.

You see, the history of petit fours goes like this...

The origin of petit fours comes from French bakers of the past.

So apparently they are called petit fours, which means small oven translated because you would bake them at the side of other bigger baking "projects".

The reason for that is because the oven would still be hot but I suppose not hot enough for a big cake, so the good women and men would come up with small éclaire, marzipan, and macaroon version aka petit fours to bake and so to use up the remaining heat of the dying flame in the oven and so to fill in the waiting time of the workers.

And I suspect that sometimes, left over dough was common so you would want to use that up as well and make the most of it.

After all, you don't waste resources, energy and time, right?

Besides people back then liked already small bites, think Madeleine's!

While Madeleine was mostly a treat for traveling train friends, petit fours were a richer men's indulgence between breakfast and lunch hour or a quick fulfilling bite during the afternoon hours.

You see, you don't want to feel hungry when you create a master piece of art such as Monsieur Chopin did.

🔪 How to make easy Petit Fours from scratch?

I picked an easy to prepare petit fours recipe for you.

We have been making these for years now and in fact, the pictures were taken last year when I made them with my mum.

It's easier when there are two people to make these as you tend to be faster in the making process of decorating them with chocolate etc.

To make petit fours you start out with a marzipan based dough aka almond paste.

It's a firm easy to handle dough that doesn't crumble.

Once you have prepared your dough let it cool in the fridge as this helps in the rolling out process later on.

Once rolled out cut out the shapes to your liking and bake those.

In the meanwhile keep a bain marie (double boiler) ready to melt the chocolate and nougat, you can choose between dark chocolate, white chocolate, and nougat.

The nougat is used to stick two cookies together to make a "sandwich" cookie.

Once the chocolate is molten, cover your cookies to your liking with the chocolate and stick molded icing sugar decoration on each petit fours.

That's it.

💡 Ideas to decorate your petit fours according to the season/occasion

To decorate the petit fours, you are free to do as you please.

I put together a few seasonal/occasional icing decoration suggestions, which will help you to get an idea of what you could do with these petit fours.

• Christmas decoration for Petit Fours

• Valentine's day decoration for Petit Fours

• Easter decoration for Petit Fours

• 

  

  

  Baby Shower decoration for Petit Fours

  

• Superhero Birthday decoration for Petit Fours (aka my nephew is a superhero fan deco)

• My niece's Birthday decoration for Petit Fours

• And Petit four decorations for my birthday! Of course 🙂

👁️ Similar Petit Fours recipes

• Homemade Chocolates
• Bethmännchen
• DIY Honey Marzipan

Dear Reader, how did you get to know about petit fours?

Please let us know in the comments further below!

📖 Recipe