Martha Stewart's April Almond Petits Fours

"Delicate cakes with an ethereal, springlike air" is how Martha likes to describe these moist little cakes... and so we gallantly dived into April's "Year of Cakes" challenge with as much springlike & ethereal behaviour as we could muster! (This of course petered out at about the 4th hour).

Our first stumbling block came right at the start this time in the ingredients section. After scouring specialist shops & European grocers we came to the conclusion that Almond paste does not lurk on our shelves in Australia... so Nicky made us up some. Let it be known that I detest marzipan. Nothing can get me to put down a slice of cake as quickly as that taste! So with much trepidation I tasted the lumpy pale glug and was horrified to find that it had "that" taste. But there was no turning back.

The cakes were easy peasy... and light, moist and fluffy. "Good one Martha". We did find that you shouldn't be too mean with the cherry preserve... the more the better in the taste department. Of course we weren't lulled into a false sense of security with the ease of cake making... because that had happened with February's cake. The cutting of the cake into precise squares was yet to come. I held the ruler.... Nicky cut the cake!



After that we put them in the fridge and had to wait an hour (BTW- We were meant to refrigerate prior to cutting, but got ahead of ourselves). We put the time to good use.


We had heard along the blogline that the icing could turn from white to hot pink in 3 drops flat. To be in keeping with the whole "ethereal" thing we thought we would go for a light pink. So we started with one drop.... nothing happened... Two.... nothing... Three... nothing ("Tiff I am getting nervous now". "Don't be nervous just bung a few more in") Five drops.... ("What colour would you say that was?" "Alabaster, the colour of Nicole Kidman's skin") Ten drops.... ("what about this colour?" "Same as Barbie's butt." "Don't say that!!!")... As you can tell we were there stirring colouring in for a fair while and ended up with three different batches!

I really enjoyed the icing process... swirling the thick stuff all around. It was a bit therapeutic... and set really well. It also tasted really yum and we both will be using this recipe again for biscuits & cupcakes. The rest of the decorations were pretty straight forward... we couldn't get the beautiful cherry blossoms in Martha's picture (not available), so we picked up some sugar ones from a lovely shop called The Bay Tree in Woollahra and the little balls are sour cherry chewing gum that I picked up from Muji in Tokyo.

Here is Martha's Almond Petit Fours:


Here are ours:



And here is one with a bite in it!


The taste? A sweet little bite... sugary for sure and the cake is very moist... and most importantly not a bit marzipany! T