I find that I bring home fresh flowers (or pick them, when I can) on a regular basis during the spring. While the stores are still full of flowers during the winter, the change in season really makes me want to bring a little more of nature indoors. Another way to decorate with flowers is to use a specialty pan to turn ordinary teacakes into springtime treats. This pretty Nordic Ware Flower Petits Fours Pan allows you to easily make 20 floral-themed petit fours to decorate your dessert table. To give you a sense of scale, each cavity produces a cake that is about the size of a mini muffin and can be eaten in 1-2 bites. The interior of the pan is nonstick, which will help ensure you get a clean release from the pan and plenty of detail on your finished cakes. As usual, however, I recommend greasing and flouring your pan to ensure that you get as much detail as possible from every nook and cranny of the detailed design.
These cakes will look best with a relatively plain cake filling – lemon, almond, vanilla, chocolate, red velvet – that has no mix-ins or only contains mix-ins that are quite small. Berries and chocolate chips tend to get stuck to the edges of the pan and prevent you from seeing the finished design clearly, though the cakes will still taste delicious. I would top these off with confectioners’ sugar, rather than icing, just to keep those lovely flowers as visible as possible.
What do you think?