Pound Cake Petits Fours

Basically, these are just pound cake, cut into squares and covered in melted candy. That sounds amazing, right?

The fancy French name makes them seem, well, fancier than they really are. Make these! – people will think you went way overboard when all you did was bake a pound cake and melt some chocolate. But they are free to think it took you forever and are also free to show their appreciation for your hard work!

Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

Pound Cake

1 cup butter, softened to room temperature (yeah, it’s a lot of butter, but it’s pound cake for Pete’s sake!)
3 T cream cheese, softened to room temperature
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
½ cup dark brown sugar
1 t baking powder
¼ t salt
3 t vanilla
¼ t almond extract
5 eggs, brought to room temperature

Coating

20 oz milk, semisweet or dark (dealers choice) chocolate chips or melting disks
½ cup white chocolate chips or melting disks (optional but we’re going for fancy here)
Food coloring (completely optional)

Directions

We’ll start with the pound cake. Butter and flour (or spray) a loaf pan and set that aside.

In a large bowl add the butter and cream cheese and mix together until fluffy, maybe 4-5 minutes. Add in your dry ingredients (flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking powder and salt) and mix again until well combined.

Next, add in the vanilla and almond and mix until combined.

Finally, add in the eggs and mix until they are very well combined and the batter is once again nice and fluffy. Hint – if you have a stand mixer you can have it running and just add the eggs as it’s mixing.

Pour your batter into your prepared loaf pan and bake at 325 for about an hour and a half. After about an hour, tent it with aluminum foil (kind of like you do with a turkey on thanksgiving). Bake until it’s nice and golden brown, and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out dry.

Transfer the entire pan to a wire rack to cool, and remove the cake from the pan after about 10 minutes so it can cool completely.

When you’re ready to add the coating, take the cake and cut the top off so you have a perfect rectangular block. Don’t throw the top away though! I mean, you don’t need it for anything in this recipe, but it’ll be nice, crunchy deliciousness all on its own.

Cut the rest of the cake into bite-sized squares. Do NOT worry if your measurements are not exact or if all the pieces aren’t the same size. This is Ugly Desserts after all.

Spread out a sheet of wax paper on your counter.

Melt your darker (either milk or semisweet) chocolate, and dip the squares into the chocolate one at a time. Move them to the wax paper to harden.

Once that candy shell has hardened, melt the white chocolate chips. If you want, add some food color to them (I did), just so everything isn’t black and white 😊

Take a spoon, spoon up a little of the white chocolate and drizzle it over the chocolate covered squares. If you want you can do what I did – do some in white then keep adding color so you have a few squares in multiple colors. Wait for the white chocolate to harden and enjoy!