Big Awesome Cake: Petit Bites

My eventual sister-in-law has an assignment for her senior packaging class (or something along those lines..). For her project she had to come up with a fake business and present the packaging and items for the fake business. She created Petit Bites, a miniature sweets business. Knowing that I AM THE MASTER OF ALL THINGS CAKE, she asked me to make her some Petit Fours for her assignment.

*Note to self: I am not the master of all things cake, I am the WIZARD of cake.

The first time I attempted Petit Fours, I was in high school, and even more impatient than I am now. (How is that possible?!) Anyways. The cake recipe I got then was from an old book published in the 70's ish, and the cake was almost tasteless! Problems: I'd never cut a cake in my life, much less cut it into tiny little squares, and the icing was all sugar and no flavor! Honestly, I don't even know how I've gotten as far as I have, remembering how terrible I was at everything back then!

Practice makes perfect :)

The Petit Fours still look a little terrible. I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to my baking, so naturally the lumps of the cake and inconsistency of the icing really tick me off. But I have to admit, they look A LOT better than they did when I made some 8 years ago. And they taste like a dream! At least, that's what I imagine dreams would taste like if they did in fact, taste. I added some orange extract and grapefruit zest into the batter, along with my vanilla extract, so it's like an orange creamsicle thing! I also added some orange extract and vanilla into my icing. Yummmmm.

Also in recent news, I've had an inquiry about cake pops. I've never made them. I had them at Starbucks once and they were terrible; once I ate them I vouched to never make them! Until this weekend, when I did. I wanted to make cake balls and a 9inch round cake to practice decorating with, so I just made some Red Velvet cake. I bought some canned cream cheese icing (eghh) and used some of my homemade buttercream icing to mix in with the cake crumbs. I definitely like the buttercream better! That canned stuff is nasty! And it's really bad for you too. The first few pops I did were messy looking.. lumpy and uneven. The rest look really great and they taste amazing! Who'dathunk'it? I used some of my seasonal sprinkles for decoration, so everyone can see all the cute sprinkle options they have! And, it lets me show off part of my sprinkle collection, muahahahaha. Now if I can just keep my dad from stealing a cake pop every time he walks by...

Ready for pictures? (As if you're going to answer..)